They are learned, but easily accessible to the non-specialist; and, above all, they feature liberal use of colour photography that takes the breath away.For our wild orchids, though by no means as outrageous in shape and hue as their tropical cousins, are still in a class by themselves for sheer beauty; and if you have any feeling for flowers at all you will be knocked back on your heels by the illustration after illustration of lady orchid, sword-leaved helleborine (which leaves lily of the valley in the shade), early spider orchid, pyramidal orchid, autumn lady’s tresses, and 50 more species.The first guide, Britain’s Orchids, is the handiest and cheapest; it will just about fit in your pocket. And it is continuing.This summer we are witnessing a remarkable event: the publication of no fewer than three books on the most glamorous group of our wild flowers, the orchids, and all three embody the characteristics that made Mabey’s and Marren’s works new departures. They broke fresh ground in their combination of formidable learning with ready accessibility for ordinary people – non-specialists, non-botanists – and, importantly, very high quality colour photography and printing They were just what botany needed In fact, you could say they began The New Botany. Marren runs Mabey a pretty close second as a naturalist-writer (he has an occasionally acid touch, in contrast to Mabey’s characteristic melancholy) and his book is a wonderfully accessible and entertaining account of rarities, of why some flowers are rare and what happens to them when they are – which once again, was lavishly illustrated with exquisite colour photographs.These books turned their back on the old botany. No wonder that it struck the chord with the public that was waiting to be struck: it sold 100,000 copies.Mabey’s work was followed three years later, in 1999, by another very original book, Britain’s Rare Flowers by Peter Marren. There was nary a sniff of the academic botanist about the book: it brought wild flowers back to the people. Furthermore, it was sumptuously illustrated with 500 memorable colour photos.

This was a completely new type of wild-flower guide by Britain’s pre-eminent writer on the natural world: it was not a botanical flora, but a cultural one, detailing the historical roles and uses of our wild plants in social life, medicine, magic and art, with the information coming from hundreds of individuals. It began with an unusual book published nine years ago, Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica. Yet if even a tenth of the people the RHS says are keen gardeners took an interest in the plants on the other side of the garden wall, they would number nearly 60 times the current membership of Plantlife.Yet something is changing. It is not part of the public consciousness; most of the public is ignorant of it. Few young people are interested, and the scientific base itself is in danger of dying out: last year a mere 26 people applied to read f botany at all British universities (and a mere 23 were accepted). Even today, when a new plant is described for the first time, it is in Latin that they write down the initial account.And so they have kept it to themselves – the joy of our wild flowers, that is It has not been widely shared. Of course, there is good scientific reason for this: there are 250,000-plus species of plants in the world, as opposed to only about 10,000 species of birds and fewer than 5,000 species of mammals, so a quarter of a million common names in every language would be an impossibility.

All the same, one gets the feeling that botanists enjoy the mystery (to others) of scientific names; they enjoy the secret language that Latin becomes for them. At that time the study of plants was at the cutting edge of science; but 300 years later it had been overtaken in complexity by the range of natural sciences, biology, physics and chemistry, so botany needed difficulty to continue to be able to validate itself. If it wasn’t complicated, how could you take a degree in it at Oxford?Botany has used several other tricks to keep itself difficult and impenetrable to outsiders. One is secrecy; field botanists have often jealously guarded the locations of rare flowers such as orchids, keeping them to small networks, in a way that is quite the opposite of birdwatchers letting each other know extensively where to find “twitchable” species.Another is the extensive use of Latin, employed far more than in ornithology or zoology, say. Even if the impulse was profoundly unconscious on the part of Messrs C, T and W, its essence was that to have pictures would be unthinkably vulgar; it would somehow just make everything too easy.For difficulty seems to be prized in botany, almost as an authenticating virtue. As a discipline, botany is anciently academic, far more so than ornithology, say, which is only a recent step up from birdwatching.

The first Oxford Professor of Ornithology, Christopher Perrins, was appointed in 1992, but the first Oxford Professor of Botany, Robert Morison, was awarded his chair in 1669. But to do that, you had to know your way round the architecture of the plant, and you had to have a good idea of what family your plant belonged to, in the first place. If you didn’t, you were lost.Why not illustrate the flowers so that non-botanists could identify them more easily? You could say that colour photography was in its infancy in 1952, or that painted illustrations would have added overly to the cost of the book, but I felt the real reason lay elsewhere. It was published in 1952 and everybody called it Clapham, Tutin and Warburg (or just CTW) after the three distinguished professors of botany who were its authors. It was hugely authoritative, this hefty tome; but that wasn’t what I noticed. What struck me about Clapham, Tutin and Warburg was that it didn’t have any pictures.How were you meant to identify wild flowers with it? By using the key, that’s how.

You matched any individual plant you found against a set of characteristics, such as hairy stems, or hairless stems. If you’re not a botanist yourself, it shuts you out.I became aware of this years ago when, as a young volunteer warden on a nature reserve, I first came across the Flora, or descriptive list of all the plants of the British Isles, that was then in general use. Why?I contend that the British public has become largely cut off from appreciating our wild flowers because of the particular long-standing nature of British botany, which as a discipline has been hermetic, arcane and decidedly inaccessible to outsiders or non-specialists. Plantlife, a charity started 15 years ago to garner support for saving our native flora, has 12,500 members.