Patricia Negus

At first glance this looked like a fabulous book. I've always been interested in fungi since my uncle Neville, (a Plant Pathologist ) took us out on a walk at Pennant hills...after some rain ...and brought back some fungi. He had me look down his microscope (I guess I was about 7 or 8 years old) and could see these rather grey dots. He explained they were spores....then tried explaining that they were "like" seed but they weren't seeds....they were spores. (I didn't get it). But I did get the fact that there were a lot of interesting living things in the bush that were not plants but were something else: fungi.
Many years later at university I studied Mycology under Professor David Griffin and was dismayed to find that the text book that I had purchased (at great expense) was all wrong. The mycologists had just decided that their taxonomy needed a drastic overhaul. I think this has not been the last time that the taxonomy has been changed drastically. But that course in mycology did make me appreciate the fact that there were classes and genera of fungi and that using a taxonomic key was invaluable in slotting the different species into groups with common features....and was also a way of distinguishing between similar specimens.
It is this that is lacking in the book by Patricia Negus. She has produced a pretty book with lots of interesting pictures of fungi but there is no order there at all. The best one seems to be able to get is that a group of the fungi were found in the same piece of forest etc. I found this lack of systematisation profoundly frustrating. And, right at the end of the book, her co-author Jane Scott alludes to this flaw and attempts to give a sort of a key. I dabble in botanical painting myself and I can see how easy it is to pursue the painting just as an art form in its own right. But then, when one produces a book such as this, I think its value is profoundly diminished by having Basidiomycetes mixed in with Ascomycetes and having species with gills mixed in with species with fleshy pores. In short: there is no taxonomic structure there at all. Maybe, Patricia could reorganise the individual paintings and with a mycologist specialist make a more useful "botanical" book out of her paintings.
However, having made this criticism, I can see the this is not really what Patricia is interested in. She enjoys the "look" of the fungi and enjoys capturing this in her watercolours. I like her watercolours. She paints well ...and it's not easy to capture these very small specimens which often have very subdued colouring. She has done this well. Maybe not superfine photo realism...but very good.
I give the book 3 stars ...mainly because I was hoping for more structure in the presentation.… (mehr)