Review: Field Guide to the Amaryllis Family by Graham Duncan, Barbara Jeppe and Leigh Voigt

Rating: Buy it ASAP – a bookshelf essential

What is it? Non-fiction, field guide

Ideal for: Plant lovers and amateur botanists

What makes it special? The content is organised by biome, with full-colour illustrations

Get it in from: Penguin Random House South Africa (Struik Nature). Otherwise, check out the Botanical Society of South Africa (or your local botanical garden).

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The Amaryllis family is made up of a whopping 18 genera, comprising 265 species located mostly in Southern Africa. And this book covers all of them. 

Amateur botanists, hikers and nature enthusiasts alike will no longer have to guess exactly which Amaryllis plant they’re looking at.

The Field Guide to the Amaryllis Family is the bible for all-things Amaryllis. Comprehensive is an understatement.

It’s detailed and fully illustrated – including drawings and photographs of the underground structures (which is hopefully only for the event that you stumble across an uprooted bulb. Please don’t dig up Amaryllis willy nilly! I beg you!)

Each entry includes where a plant is found, look-alikes, and its life cycle. That way, you’ll know when to look out for flowers, seeds, or good ol’ fashioned greenery. It also features the history and medicinal properties of each species.

Finding a plant is easy, as they’re organised by biome. If you don’t know what that is, no problem. The authors have included a section explaining what these are and how they differ. 

This means that depending on which region you’re located in – and there are maps to help you work it out – you can narrow down searches, making identification user friendly.

[I feel like this is a good point to repeat: there are 265 different species of this plant. That creates a lot of potential for misidentification.]

As an aside, this is exactly how I discovered that I live on the cusp of two biomes; fynbos and succulent karoo (the authors are turning me into a novice geographer, too – how’s that for an added bonus?).

This book is also a visual record of the entire Amaryllis family. If you don’t use it as a field guide, you could still keep it is a comprehensive botanical diary. The photographs and illustrations are downright gorgeous, and for good reason. It took a tribe; 162 photographers and artists.

And as a final treat, it provides a list of bulb stockists, so that you can source some of these botanical delights for yourself, too.  

Field Guide to the Amaryllis Family by Graham Duncan, Barbara Jeppe and Leigh Voigt is published by Galley Press, and can be sourced from Struik Nature, an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa.