This is a soft-cover pocket guide, but you'll need fairly deep and well-stitched pockets to carry it. But the investment in new clothes will be well worth in if you're looking for a top-class filed guide to the flowers of the area that we useed to know as the Transvaal and now as North West, Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces. The species are arranged according to the general colour of the flower: white-cream, pink, yellow-orange, red, blue, mauve-purple, brown and green. There are 614 illustrated plants, comprising 330 genera and 90 families (for those readers with a taxonomic bent).

The book is endorsed by the South African Botanical Institute and is suitable for both professionals and recreational flower spotters, with notes on the plant families and their distribution, a glossary of terms, literature and reading list, and other background 'stuff'.