David L. Jones (1) (1944–)

This book promised a lot but didn't really deliver. It is about palm trees throughout the world ....and there are a lot of them so clearly the task was not going to be easy. Basically there are two parts to the book. The first is a text introduction to palms; their botanical structure, economic importance, biology, cultivation, diseases and propagation. Generally this was well done but I was surprised that there is no actual botanical key....so it's pretty much impossible to classify any palm tree based on this book.There is a kind of a key on p11. but 10 groups are shown as having reduplicate leaf folding and pinnate leaf shape. In other words there is no way to distinguish between these 10 groups ....maybe containing over a thousand different species.
The second part of the book is a description (alphabetical order) of a range of palms that are commonly grown. When I was casually looking at the book, I noted the large number of coloured photos and thought that it would be comprehensive and that there would be one picture for each species. ...But No! It's more like one photo per 5 species. And the photos are not consistent. So we might have a photo of a mature plant or a juvenile plant or an inflorescence etc. Sometimes just a detail on the stem. And, whilst these photos are interesting themselves it's not very helpful looking at a picture of a young or juvenile plant and trying to picture how they might look after 30 years. (Having made this criticism, I must add that I do appreciate how difficult it is to get a comprehensive collection of pictures ....let alone a set that covers all the mature plants, or all the inflorescences/fruit etc. It is extremely difficult). Whilst the existing pictures may be of some help in identifying the named species...though this is doubtful.....they are of no use whatsoever in identifying the much larger number that only have a general description. I have another book titled the "Palms of Malaysia" and though much smaller than the current book, it has a good botanical key which makes it a lot more useful when trying to identify species.
I did learn some new things however, Initially I thought it was a mistake but Malesia is a name for a botanical area that covers Indonesia, Philippines .....and maybe Malaysia and PNG depending on the definitions adopted.
I also learned that there are probably about 2600 species in 200 genera of palm trees and that carnuba wax is obtained from the leaves of a palm tree. Also that the Nypa fruticans (or Mangrove palm) grows like a true mangrove in shallow estuaries and swampy soils. And many other facts that were new to me. So it was interesting despite some major weaknesses. I give it three stars.… (mehr)