What Plant Is This, Anyway?
Alfred Byrd Graf’s whopping picture books make it easy to tell which witch hazel is which.

When it comes to the garden, even the most gifted of writers may be humbled by a single, sharp, no-nonsense photograph. And for longer than most house-plant devotees can remember, the answer to that classic question – “What is it?” – has been found by consulting one of Alfred Byrd Graf’s monumental illustrated books. Published in various incarnations over the last 40 years, these include “Exotic House Plants Illustrated” (the latest edition has 1,200 photographs), “Exotica” (now in two volumes with 16,000 photographs) and “Tropica” (which weighs in with 7,000 photographs).

Now in his ninth decade, and still at it, Mr. Graf has brought forth yet another colossal tome: “Hortica: Color Cyclopedia of Garden Flora.” Like it’s predecessors, it is published by Roehrs Company, the New Jersey nursery with which he has long been associated as both a bring-‘em-back-alive plant hunter and an expert recorder of species in situ.

Mr. Graf’s latest work is just shy of three inches thick and has, the title page proclaims, 8,100 photos “in living color.” There are also over 250 pages of descriptive text covering about 7,500 species in concise paragraphs that typically include plant origin, size, a smidgen of history and a smattering of observations about flower color, fruit, leaf form and hardiness zone.

The chosen species differ from those in earlier works in that they are not exclusively warm-climate plants. They were, as the introduction explains, “recorded by the author with notebook and camera . . .in nearly every inhabited region on earth.” So along with subtropical yuccas, camellias and orchids there is a selection of temperate-zone hellebores, campanulas, witch hazels, lilacs and crab apples, annotated with botanical and common names.

Clearly Mr. Graf gets a kick out of letting us know where he’s found his subjects, including personal touches in his “pictorial colorama,” occasionally laced with droll humor. Tucked in among straightforward plant mug shots, for example, are plants in whimsical context, like the Bitter Seville orange tree in Cordoba, Spain, where the horse that apparently drew Mr. Graf’s carriage to the site has turned for a better view of the picture taker.

Family and friends appear unexpectedly – witness those four hand-holders who demonstrate that it’s impossible to encircle the gigantic 3,000-year-old General Sherman tree in California’s Sequoia National Park.
Mr. Graf’s voyages “from Kew to Cairo, from Chile to Java” (as he described them in the 1958 edition of “Exotica”) have contributed mightily to Roehrs’s renowned stock of indoor plants. But it was what he called his avocation – photographing plants, originally for sales catalogues – that took on a life of its own. That sideline has again added to what has become the most invaluable library of pictorial reference books that any gardener could hanker for.

From: The New York Times Book Review August 22, 1993 author: Linda Yang