Medicinal Flora Of Britain And Northwestern Europe

About this book

Describes more than 80 families containing 500 species of native and introduced herbs. Barker gives a general overview of the families’ characteristics, followed by a botanical description of the species, then a more discursive historical and medical account of the genus. The book is extremely topical and covers the debate on the safety of Comfrey and the drug interactions with St John Wort.

Contents

Text of Contents

8 Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
10 Geographical scope and Map
12 How Botanists classify Plants
How the Plants in this book are arranged the Field Guide

13 How to go about identifying Wild Flowers
Using this book to Identify Plants in the Field

14 Keys
< the short cut to Identification

28 GUIDE TO THE FIELD STUDY OF PLANTS
28 Habit and habitat
30 Stem features
30 Leaves (and stipules and bracts)
31 The arrangement of the flowers (inflorescence)
32 Flowers32 Structure of the Flower
33 Fruits, if present

34 GLOSSARY OF BOTANIC TERMS

CHECKLISTS
36 Trees and Shrubs According to Shape of Leaves
38 Family Characters

PREFACE TO THE PLANT ENTRIES
50 Preface to Medicinal Entries
56 How information is presented
57 Annotated example of Plant entry

THE PLANT ENTRIES
For a list of Families see Checklist of Family Characters, pages 38<50

DICOTYLEDONS
Families 1<78, Species 1<453

MONOCOTYLEDONS
Families 79-85, Species 454<507

ADDENDUM
Species 508<532

APPENDIX
573 Historical Notes
575 Bibliography for BOTANICAL SECTION

578 Medicines for Internal Use
596 Medicines for External Use

604 Alphabetic plant index