Guido Lanfranco is my mother's hero (I am her hero too, but that's only because she is biased). He probably has no idea, but I'll bet that at his venerable age, so many people turn to his well-researched books to recall information that they once heard on some lazy Sunday from their grandmother.

In fact, over the years, Mr Lanfranco has made it his life's quest to research that which is sometimes sadly forgotten in our industrial, supposedly modern and improved lives, including our everyday ecology, the wildlife we are surrounded with, crafts of our forefathers, our traditions and heritage, and even toys: Mr Lanfranco has covered them all.

In this beautiful new book, which blooms with the author's beautifully detailed illustrations, Mr Lanfranco manages to do the unthinkable: his information is enough to get any potato off its couch and back into our meadows to investigate, book in hand, that which we are surrounded with. In fact, as the author writes in the introduction, Fjuri Slavaġ Maltin is intended to help readers start appreciating our natural heritage, and the first step towards this appreciation is, "learning the common names of wild plants; once recognised and identified by name these plants start appearing like old friends".

For example, did you know that in Malta we have something called wild saffron? To me the stamens inside, bright blood-red and perky look exactly like the ones I throw into my risotto. Or that there is a plant called żafran tal-blat (stone saffron) and which looks completely different? Poppies in yellow, red and purple take a happy leap into life out of the page. This book could very well give a fresh perspective on your everyday travels, stuck in some hideous traffic jam, as you stop to look at "weeds" on the side of the road and start seeing flowers. Rather than just a book, this is a restoration of faith in what we are surrounded with and what the earth throws up without too much effort on our part, or rather, despite our lack of effort. Yet because I, and not just middle-aged ladies who are such fans of Mr Lanfranco's work, am also pained at the lack of editing which research like this surely deserves and which has not been executed well in this instance. In what seems to be publishing cost-cutting, the explanations to the flowers are not on the same page as the relative illustrations, necessitating the reader to skip from the front or the back to the centre of the book where the illustrations are. Having explanations and illustrations on the same page would have done the author and his valuable work much more justice.

On Mr Lanfranco's part, I am looking forward to when he combines his research on medicinal flowers in Ħxejjex Mediċinali u Oħrajn fil-Gżejjer Maltin with this study. It would simply be perfect to have a well-indexed reference book on what are sadly becoming lost pockets of land and natural heritage buried under developers' rubble.

Fjuri Slavaġ Maltin is not the kind of life's work that is done for monetary gain. Yet it is of supreme importance. In writing and illustrating Fjuri Slavaġ Maltin, Mr Lanfranco has done his readers and this country in general a great service. I hope someone honours him with a Ġieh ir-Repubblika, and soon. My mum does too.

• For Mr Borg, his garden is a bulwark against the ugly world outside.

• A review copy of this title was supplied by the author.

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