A brief look at the first few pages of this guide to the nomenclature of horticulture will be enough to convince the reader of the author's zeal and his appetite for research. For classicists perhaps, the most interesting feature is his account of the major players in the history of plant classification.

Most readers of this journal, for example, will know of the Athenian writer Theophrastus from his ‘Characters’, first popularised in English when included by Penguin with Vellacott's translations of Menander. But Theophrastus also counts as the first classifier of plants, and it is through/from him that we get the names pelargonium, geranium, anemone, peony and antirrhinum, among others.

Then much later we learn of John Ray, apparently self-taught as a botanist, whose Historia Plantarum (1686-1704) runs to over 2000 pages in three large volumes. He it was who placed some 6000 plants into 125 families and laid the foundations of modern nomenclature.

It was entirely natural, within Europe at least, for Latin to reign supreme as the language of plant classification. It simply remained for the astoundingly industrious Swede, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) to make his indelible mark on the history of botany via his Systema Natura – already in its 10th edition when the author was 51. His binomial system, as Parker is quick to point out, has proved both invaluable and enduring, neatly reducing the name of the Hoary Plantain (for instance) from Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindricali, scapo tereti – ‘plantain with downy narrow oval leaves tapering to a point at each end, a cylindrical head and a smooth stem’ – to the succinct Plantago media – ‘intermediate plantain’.

With its relentless torrent of information and anecdote, allied with many comprehensive word lists, this book is really for the enthusiast, nay fanatic. It is no doubt instructive to learn, for example, that the adjective alpinus indicates ‘above the tree-line’ whereas alpestris indicates below it. But which general reader, even one with a penchant for making their back garden into a mini-Paradise, really needs the exhaustive story of the naming of the flowering quince that fills page 91?