Guide to waterside flowers

The Waterside flowers guide covers 46 of the special flowers that you may see on walks by still and moving water in Britain and Ireland. Still water includes ponds, reservoirs, lakes and canals, while moving water covers ditches, streams and rivers.

Good places to look for a wide range of plants are large ponds with shallow sides, lightly used canals and the slower-flowing parts of streams and rivers such as backwaters.

Beautiful colour paintings by Lizzie Harper show the key features of each plant, including flowers, leaves and stems. Accompanying text on the reverse side highlights important features to look out for. The guide features flowers in three groups: marginal plants, reed-swamp and floating plants. Use this concise fold-out guide to quickly put a name to the flowers that you see.

Plants are arranged into three groups, moving from damp water margins to reed swamp and into the open water. Marginal plants grow along the water’s edge, and you can see them from dry land, like a canal towpath. Then reed swamp is a community of emergent plants in permanent water. Finally floating plants grow further out into open water.