Book review: Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley

I love books about weeds and wild plants – they generally contains little gems of fascinating information about useful and edible plants, tidbits you don’t find in gardening manuals. It’s been a while since I had the chance to sit down and peruse a good book, so it was great to be offered a review copy of Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley, which has the subtitle “an extensive and fully illustrated guide from seedlings to fruit.”

It starts with some information about weeds – the various definitions of what is and isn’t considered to be a weed, and some of the history of weeds as we transform from a nation of peasant farmers into gardeners. There are notes on the impact of foreign travel and of some of the invasive weeds that have made it to the British Isles.

Written by a botanist who worked at RBG Kew, the book is divided into sections for Non-flowering and Flowering plants. In fact it only lists two species in the Non-flowering plants section – bracken and common/field horsetail. The Flowering plants section is much larger, divided into Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. Whilst this is a fairly fundamental difference for botanists, it’s much less of a concern to gardeners – it refers to whether seedlings of the plants appear with one or two seed leaves.

Inside these sections plants are listed in alphabetical order of their plant family, so to find a species this way you have to know its family tree, i.e. that Common Amaranth and Common Orache are both in the Amaranthaceae family. Each species is listed by its common and scientific names, and both appear in the Index, which is the quickest way of finding what you’re looking for.

The entry for each species contains multiple colour images, and information on Pollination,