Everything you didn't need to know
Ardent fans of Brendan Lepschi’s 2012 Over Educated© publication The Taller Tree of Liff will be delighted to learn they can now access this iconic booklet forevermore via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The Taller Tree of Liff is a reimagining of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff but for people interested in plants. This invaluable lexicon provides an A to Z to help define various situations, objects and experiences peculiar to botanists, especially when undertaking field work. Indeed, it is recommended reading for anyone who has encountered a bastardia, experienced a clappia, has a low tolerance for funckia, suffers from pothos, or has a knack for collecting scrotochloas, among other things.
The Taller Tree of Liff was launched with much hype at the ASBS 2012 conference dinner in Perth, an infamous evening in which we also heard a tantalising excerpt from Ryonen Butcher’s Mills ‘n’ Swoon inspired romance featuring botanist Anita Grady and her Marquis de Clade, Jack Mallet (mallet by name, mallet by nature).
BHL Australia
Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia continues to digitise biodiversity literature critical to taxonomic and systematic research in Australia and beyond, making it openly accessible and searchable online under the ‘Australian Botanical’ archive. This collection includes an assortment of key historical publications and also archives recent research published in state, territory and national Herbarium journals.
BHL will also consider archiving other important literature if deemed by end users to be relevant to our research community. One can hope that one day this will include an updated edition of The Taller Tree of Liff. If so, then Lepschi may need to include the definition of procrassula (vb), a form of procrastination that involves pleasurably perusing biodiversity literature on BHL Australia rather dealing with duckeodendrons (n).
Kelly Shepherd & Juliet Wege
