The drawings of plants at the head of each chapter and section are from two main sources. The older are line drawings by Walter Hood Fitch (1817–1892) made for George Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora in 1863–5. These served the Handbook and field botany in general until well into the twentieth century. Most of the remainder are by Stella Ross-Craig of Kew, published as Drawings of British Plants between 1948 and 1973.
The drawing of Downy Rose in Chapter Two is a sketch by Keble Martin, which, as a full watercolour, occupied a prominent position on the dust jacket of The Concise British Flora. It is taken from Sketches for the Flora (1972) by W. Keble Martin, p.72. The drawing of Radnor Lily on p.33 appeared in Flora of Radnorshire by Ray Woods, reproduced by the author’s kind permission. That of Suffolk Lungwort on p.44 was specially commissioned for this book by Fred Rumsey. That of Interrupted Brome was drawn by C. E. Hubbard for his book Grasses (1954) and reproduced by permission of Penguin Books. The leaves and berries of Ley’s Whitebeam on p.98 were drawn by Tim Rich and reproduced by his kind permission. Proliferous Pink, on p.113, was drawn by James Sowerby for Smith’s English Botany in 1801 and is in the public domain. Leafless Hawk’s-beard on p.147 is from a coloured drawing by Jacob Sturm in Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen (1776), also in the public domain. Estuarine Sedge on p.199 is from The BSBI Handbook, Sedges of the British Isles, with the permission of BSBI.