Westcott's Plant Disease Handbook, Sixth Edition (2002)

Westcott's Plant Disease Handbook, Sixth Edition. Revised by R.K. Horst . 16 × 24 cm , 1028 pp. Dordrecht, the Netherlands : Kluwer Academic Publishers ( www.kap.nl ), 2001 . £210 . ISBN 07923 8663 9 (hardback ). This thousand-page handbook – for plant pathologists with big hands and deep pockets – starts with a short introduction on plant disease control, followed by two principal sections: the main types of disease classified by symptom, from anthracnose to wilt, and an A–Z of plant genera with their most common diseases. There are no diagnostic keys, but the A–Z and a comprehensive index allow diseases to be tracked fairly easily. The emphasis is on practical disease management. There is plenty of advice on fungicides, but the selection exemplifies the problem with this book for European readers: it is an American book. Of the long list of products, some are no longer available even in the USA, and very few indeed are sold on the UK amateur market. The USA legal background to pesticide use is given very clearly, but things are different over here and the crucial constraint (at least for UK users) – that the target diseases and hosts are specified explicitly in the statutory part of the label – is not discussed. The book is written for gardeners, and reassuringly advises ‘Don’t let all the scientific names worry you’, but I think these names should have worried the editors a bit more, as errors are rather frequent. Neem, for example, is Azadirachta indica, not Melis (sic) azedarach. The updating has not been very consistent, various editions of the Dictionary of the Fungi (see Plant Pathology51, 255) as far back as 1961 are cited. I checked Westcott's entry for camellia petal blight, a disease of current interest in the UK. It is listed as Sclerotinia camelliae in the host A–Z, and appears under Sclerotinia in the Blights section, but as ‘Ciberinia (sic) camelliae (formerly Sclerotinia camelliae)’. The genus Ciborinia is listed separately under Blights, but it does not yet include C. camelliae. Perhaps it will get there by the next edition. I also checked Dutch Elm Disease, where Ophiostoma ulmi and O. novo-ulmi are both listed as pathogens. There is much detail on the introduction of O. ulmi from Europe in infested elm wood and the devastation it caused in the USA, but there is no other mention of O. novo-ulmi, the cause of the current epidemic in the USA and Europe, which arrived in the UK in infested North American elm wood! A proposed control strategy for DED mentions insecticide spraying during the dormant season, something never seriously countenanced in the UK. Environmental problems with massive DDT spraying are noted, but no substitute is suggested. There are line drawings of symptoms and also fungal microstructure, although the latter are microscopic characters inaccessible to most gardeners. The many black and white photographs are more useful, and there are also eight colour plates. The illustrations are often nowhere near the text that they illustrate, and the cross-referencing is from text to picture, but not vice versa. If I worked as a plant diagnostician in the USA, I should expect my employer to buy this book. Despite the rather erratic updating it is undoubtedly a uniquely useful resource. It is not a book for amateur gardeners, but it would be very useful for professional horticulturalists and also extension workers, who are almost extinct in UK but still survive in North America. If you are a keen UK gardener, Buczacki S & Harris K 1998. Collins Photoguide to Pests, Diseases and Disorders of Garden Plants. London, UK: HarperCollins, will serve your needs better, with pests and disorders thrown in for good measure and leaving you about £190 richer. Those working in the professional sector will buy Alford DV (ed.) 2000. Pest and Disease Management Handbook. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science, for the same reasons, and also be much better off. A few European diagnosticians and plant health professionals will probably want Westcott as a source of information on North American plant diseases, but the price is ludicrous. I would make the purchase of the excellent American Phytopathological Society's compendia (www.scisoc.org) a higher priority.