Forest Trees of Australia

This book describes and illustrates 223 of the most important native trees, selected because of their environmental significance, their importance to the timber industry, or because they are conspicuous in the landscape. The criteria used to select species were that they should be important to the timber industry, conspicuous in the landscape or of environmental importance. Consideration was given also to a range of species from across the Australian landscape eg for a large genus like Melaleuca, the main species from most Australian States were included. With these criteria a total of 137 euclaypt species and 86 non-eucalypt species were selected. This enlarged considerably the scope of the previous edition which contained 116 eucalypt and 15 non-eucalypt species. Of note is the increased number of non-eucalypt species, particularly of some important rainforest species, and new descriptions of several generic groups. Descriptions of the more important rainforest species were largely avoided, for various reasons, in previous editions of "Forest Trees of Australia". A special feature of the book is the extensive use of black and white photography to illustrate each species. This incorporated the novel use of flash photography to illustrate leaf venation and the use of scanning electron microgreaphs (S.E.M.) to illustrate finer botanical features, readily seen by the naked eye or with the aid of a small hand-lens but too small to be illustrated satisfactorily by normal macrophotographic techniques.