"Pragmatic flora" technical field guides

Tree (and shrub) floras

Tree guides covering countries or regions, represent a common theme for tropical guides, including:

Soepadmo & Wong (eds.) (Sabah and Sarawak: 1995). Far too heavy for most field trips, but otherwise field-friendly compared with most floras, and useful for specimens in the herbarium or field camp. Probably cannot usefully be called a type of field guide though.
Aubréville (Ivory Coast, 1959). Excellent illustrations, with field-worker friendly details, but not optimised for fieldwork, with large format, several volumes, and large font.
Keay, Onochie & Stanfield (Nigeria: 1960-64). Fewer illustrations than previous, unusual for the time with a multi-access key at the back supporting vegetative characters. Well used and liked by botanists in West Africa. Revised as Keay et al (1989), but revision sadly lost some of the unique features and rarer species.
Dale and Greenway (Kenya: 1961). Unfriendly but at one stage indispensable for fieldwork, with too few pictures and vegetative notes, but some local names to help. Identification of sterile trees in the field, even very distinctive ones, involved long hours browsing through many pages of text. Now replaced by the far friendlier field guide by Beentje (1994), below.

Beentje (Kenya, 1994). More compact than Dale and Greenway’s guide (above) but easier to use, with useful distribution maps for all species and drawings for genera.
There are many examples of Pragmatic floras for developed countries – one of our favourites being Blamey and Grey-Wilson (1989), based on paintings and text of British Plants, but there are many other excellent examples.
Hawthorne & Jongkind (Western Africa: 2006) is packed with field-appropriate photos, drawings and text, and species details are limited to the essentials.