AHUNDRED YEARS AGO Arthur Tansley edited a book entitled Types of British Vegetation, written by the botanists of the Central Committee for the Survey and Study of British Vegetation. This book of 1911 was the first account of its kind, written for the benefit of a small and select international group of botanists invited for a countrywide excursion, and describing associations of plants that define our vegetation. He wrote a greatly enlarged account of the vegetation of Britain and Ireland in 1939, a landmark in the study of our vegetation. It was made possible by the strong tradition of the study and recording of our flora, which goes back long before this synthesis, maintained by a multitude of field botanists, very often county-based. It is their local knowledge that has been essential for understanding our vegetation and its composition. Since Tansley’s time, the vegetation of Britain and Ireland has been studied in much more depth, with results often presented in the many New Naturalist books written about the natural history of the regions or more generally about plants or particular groups of plants, such as the early volume on Wild Flowers (1954), which ran to many editions. The present book is indeed timely in the sense that so much has been learned in recent years about our changing flora and its distribution, stimulated by the mapping projects of the Botanical Society of the British Isles and county botanical recorders. The more recent recognition of the significance of biodiversity has also promoted our interest in the flora and its distribution, especially in respect of the importance of the nature of environments in determining distribution, perhaps less well-understood and understudied in earlier years. The wealth of information now gained needs to be seen against the wider background of the plant communities that form our vegetation. Such needs have resulted in classification of our vegetation in more formal ways, remembering that any ordering presents just a necessary snapshot in a changing world. Michael Proctor has an unrivalled and practical life-time knowledge of our flora and vegetation, with expertise about both higher and lower plants, also reflected in his earlier New Naturalist book with his colleague Peter Yeo on The Pollination of Flowers (1973). He is also a very experienced photographer – his photography appeared in the original New Naturalist Wild Flowers – as will be seen in the illustrations. The treatment of the major classes of vegetation, following discussion of the essential historical aspects of the subject, places local floras in the wider context of the vegetation of Britain and Ireland, an original aim of Tansley, now realised so well by Michael Proctor.