Plants of the Balearic
Islands, 4th Edition

By Anthony Bonner
December 2004
Editorial Moll
ISBN: 8427308744
148 pages, Illustrated, 5 ½" x 8 ¼"
$29.50 Paper Original

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The Majorcan countryside has a varied landscape: the green of cultivated fields, the shade of the oak forest, the brilliant light of seaside dunes, the poor, stone-covered mountain lands, the cliffs surprisingly spotted with vegetation, the rocky coasts which endure suffocating heat in the summer and the battering of the sea in winter, or the eternally damp marshlands.

All these landscapes differ visually and aesthetically from one another because differences in the amount of sun, in their location, in their history, or in their microclimate have given birth to different communities of plants. Or, to put it another way, the vegetation always has to overcome some disadvantage or problem, some excess or shortage (of sun, heat, water, wind, salt, drainage, etc.).

This has given rise to myriad adaptations, to plants that have managed to circumvent a handicap or turn it to profit, sometimes to such an extent that the plant has become dominant in a specific habitat or unable to live in any other. These problems of excess or shortage may provide us a key to understanding the vegetation around us, to identifying the plant communities of the Balearic Islands.

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