The Oxford Dictionary of Plant Science

The Oxford Dictionary of Plant Science edited by Michael Allaby Oxford University Press (2012)

Michael Allaby's third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Plant science provides a lengthy and comprehensive update of the two earlier editions. In his preface to the first edition Allaby sets out the dictionary's objective to cover complex biological principles and explain them succinctly. This is certainly achieved in a compact little book that acts almost as a pocket encyclopaedia of biological terms. In this way it achieves the editor's aims of combining the short entries of a dictionary with the longer ones of an encyclopaedia.

With over 7,600 entries from across the plant sciences this dictionary caters for a wide range of interests, from ecology, Earth Sciences, Earth history, evolution, genetics, plant physiology, biochemistry, cytology and biogeography, to list the disciplines cited in the preface. From asparagus to zea, anthocyanins to zwitterions, the entries span a wide spectrum of biological interest offering...