Annals of Botany 89: 649-650, 2002
© 2002 Annals of Botany Company
Plant life. Ennos R, Sheffield E. 2000.
Plant life.
Ennos R, Sheffield E. 2000.
Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd.
£22·50 (softback). 217 pp.
Plant life provides a clear, simple and short introduction to plant form for schools and universities. It aims to avoid the tendency of many texts to ‘plough remorselessly through all the different groups of plants’ or to emphasize ‘the bewildering variety of morphological and reproductive characteristics’. These aims are admirable because it is perhaps these old-fashioned approaches that have discouraged potential students and led to the gradual decline in the teaching of botany in schools and universities. Trained in a different era, I have certainly long ceased to be astonished by the ignorance about plants of first year biology undergraduates: beyond a superficial knowledge of photosynthesis many seem to know little more than there are trees and there is grass. And yet plants provide the outstanding opportunity in biology to convey concepts of biological diversity and the evolution of living form. For a start everyone is constantly exposed to them, far more so than to any other living group. It is lamentable that botanists have not been able to take advantage of the huge popularity of gardening and ecotourism to generate an interest in their science. This book makes a noble attempt to modernize the way in which botany is taught.
Plant life aims to treat plants as whole living organisms and, by placing them in an evolutionary context, describe plant forms as adaptations to their environment, including both its physical and biotic components. The text is clearly written and, illustrating the text, there are many simple line drawings and black and white photographs, with a central section of colour photographs. The first section outlines evolutionary and phylogenetic theory. The second examines the nature of plant adaptations to either a free-floating existence, or life on rocky coasts, or on or above the ground, focusing, respectively, on the adaptations of unicellular algae, seaweeds, bryophytes and vascular plants. The final section examines plants in the wet tropics, seasonal climates, deserts (both cold and hot) and in aquatic habitats. An appendix provides a simplified classification of plants.
A book like this lives or dies by the examples it uses and illustrates. With a vast diversity—about half a million potential examples—it is of course an impossible task to choose what to put in and what to leave out, but there are some nice unfamiliar examples here. I particularly liked the range of Lemnaceae illustrated: the inclusion of Lemna frisulea, with the most normal leaves, adds greatly to the understanding of the more extreme forms of L. minor or Wolffia. The first section uses plant examples to emphasize aspects of the process of evolution, but in some ways this seems out of place in this book. Perhaps this space might have been more interestingly used to expand the later sections of the book, using these early examples later in a different context.
The second section is perhaps where the book comes closest to a traditional approach, at least in its sequence of examples (algae, bryophytes, pteridophytes, spermatophytes), largely because of the emphasis here on reproduction. In some ways these chapters might have been better titled; for example, the chapter on ‘Life above ground’ is mainly ‘Reproduction above ground’. Elsewhere in the book the traditional classification approach is sneaked in by the provision of illustrations of exemplar taxa, so, for example, there are illustrations of vegetative and reproductive features of Gnetum, Welwitschia, Ephedra and Ginkgo in section 3.
The book is strongest in section 3 where a range of adaptations, both convergent and non-convergent, across diverse groups is described. It is here that the book exceeds anything available in any of the large American introductory biology texts, such as Campbell et al. (1999) or Purves et al. (2001) The book fulfils its aims best when it illustrates examples of convergence, for example Euphorbia and Cactus together, or Ceratophyllum with Elodea or Zostera with Ranunculus fluitans. At the end of each chapter the reader is challenged by ‘Points for Discussion’ or suggested ‘Practical Investigations’.
The book is admirably concise, but of course one wants it both ways, and the weaknesses of the book stem largely from its limited length and therefore limited scope. What has been left out? There is very little biochemistry or physiology, both key aspects of plant life, and the huge diversity of flowers is treated here in just over 2 pages.
Another absence, perhaps, is a feel for the current excitement of plant evolutionary studies, either in studying the relationship of plants to climate change or even in our understanding of their phylogeny. Indeed after introducing cladistic techniques in the introduction, it is a shame that the classification is rather traditional and outdated; for example, it maintains the whiskferns as distinct from ferns, it does not recognize the gymnosperms as a group and dicots are recognized as a group distinct from monocots, with no mention of the eudicots. The book was published in 2000 and it is a mark of how rapidly things are changing in plant classification at present that this rather traditional approach seems outmoded.
The authors have made an interesting attempt to present the information in a fresh and more easily digested manner by departing from the traditional approach. The book is introductory and it is unfair to want more; indeed, it should be a mark of its success if it encourages students to find out more. I am sure that the book will find a place as a text in schools and at an introductory level in universities. I shall be recommending it to my students.
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LITERATURE CITED
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Campbell NA, Reece JB, Mitchell LG. 1999. Biology. 5th edn. Menlo Park, California: Addison-Wesley Longman Inc.
Purves WK, Sadava D, Orians GH, Heller HC. 2001. Life, the Science of Biology. 6th edn. New York: W. H. Freeman.
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