Plants of Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, Western Himalaya: A Field Guide

Yesterday (27^th Sept. 2017) I received my copy of ‘Plants of Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, Western Himalaya: A Field Guide”.

As claimed it is a good field guide for the person interested in flowering plants of West Himalayan hills. The authors of this document are well known workers of angiosperm taxonomy who have done extensive explorations in this part of the Himalaya. Expertise of the authors is visible in this document where they have described and illustrated about 575 species of montane, sub-alpine and alpine habitats. The alpine flora of the Himalaya, particularly of the Uttarakhand is difficult as these plants are less accessible and thus not well studied, collected or photographed. Even in the Oleg Polunin and Adam Stainton’s “Flowers of the Himalaya”, one of the most important pictorial document for high elevation flora, Uttarakhand was not well represented which becomes apparent by their remark- “It must be confessed that both authors have traveled much less in the hills of Uttar Pradesh than elsewhere in the Himalaya.” and “However, it remains true that if one wishes to see either the East or West Himalayan flora at its best one should not choose to visit this central portion”. I wonder, the authors of this field guide either took it as a challenge or were inspired by the ‘Flowers of the Himalaya’. The fact considered as weakness by Polunin and Stainton can be taken as strength of the flora of Uttarakhand where both eastern Himalayan and western Himalayan elements intermingle and represented making it rich, though with less endemism.

What attracts me more is the price of this document which is very affordable to even a research student (it costs 695 India Rupees including postage) and I hope it will soon become popular for this reason alone.

Printing quality has improved in India significantly and this document with this much low price is one example. However, one must not forget that conditions in high hills are not always very friendly for photographing the plants, particularly in rainy season, the main flowering season. It must have taken years of repeated efforts to develop this remarkable collection of large number of species. Since it is a field guide (and not a traditional flora) it lacks keys but the authors have an alternative to it in the form of a short cut to reach to a species by classifying plants based on flower colours and providing thumbnail and page number of each species in this classification.

The nomenclatural part and identifications are appropriate though I disagree/ sceptical (I wish I prove wrong!) with (very) few identities. Though, these do not undermine the quality and usefulness of this document.

In my opinion this book deserves place in institutional libraries, and more so in the personal libraries of the naturalists interested in the floral wealth of the Himalaya. It makes the difficult job of identification easier with images and description, after all “a picture is worth a thousand words”.