Book review

A colour handbook of diseases of small graincereal crops. T. D. Murray, D. W. Parry andN. D. Cattlin. 16 cm £ 24 cm. 142 pp. London,UK: Manson Publishing 1998. £29´95. ISBN1-874545-39-1.

This book contains a useful set of coloured illustrationsof a large number of the diseases that infect small graincereals, comprising wheat, barley, oats and rye. Thediseases are grouped into those affecting the ear andgrain, stem and leaf, and stem-base and root. There isan additional section on pathogen structures and alsotwo appendices, one giving diagnostic features of manyof the diseases, the other describing the worldwidedistribution and cereal affected by each disease andpathogen. The index lists the diseases, the pathogensand the crops, with cross-reference to the other listings.Taken together, these sections provide a very useful aidto diagnosis of diseases of these crops, with severaldifferent ways of approaching the identification. Thereare many original coloured illustrations, and someprovided by other suppliers who are acknowledged, allof which will be valuable aids to diagnosis. There is apanel at the top of each description of a disease thatgives a small world map showing distribution, and aguide to which of the four crops any disease infects. Thebook does not describe physiological disorders causedby deficient soils and other abiotic conditions.

There is a general, nontechnical, introduction to plantdiseases and a short section on disease control. Thissection is not useful reading for professional plantpathologists, but could make the book more accessibleto lay readers and perhaps farmers not specificallytrained in plant pathology but who might wish todiagnose a cereal disease. To assist such people there isalso a glossary of terms used in the book, or some thatreaders might find elsewhere. It contains quite a numberof useful definitions, but obviously in a book of thissize, it could not be comprehensive.

I found a few details that I considered were somewhatstrange. Being particularly interested in the rustdiseases, I was interested to read, for the brown and

yellow rusts of wheat, that the symptoms weresporulating pustules on the surface of the leaf. It wastherefore curious to read that `the symptoms of blackstem rust are not very prominent'¼ `Signs of thepathogen are most apparent and provide the diagnosticstructures needed to differentiate black stem rust frombrown rust.' In fact, sporulating pustules are just asdiagnostic for black stem rust as for the other twowheat rusts, and if called symptoms for one could becalled symptoms for all three, or perhaps they should allbe called signs. The glossary definition for `sign' is `apathogen or parts of a pathogen observed on a diseasedplant'. For the rusts, also, I thought the world maps ofdistribution were somewhat crude, showing all three asworldwide. There is clearly a tendency for black stemrust to occur in warmer and more continental climates,and yellow rust to occur in moister maritime climates andat high altitudes in warmer areas. Some climates,however, do seem favourable for all three, such as inparts of Australia.

There is a bibliography. This is divided into foursections, the first being labelled as general, and threesets grouped according to the divisions of the plant usedin the main part of the book. Most of these referenceswill be readily accessible to interested readers. Ofcourse, the list has to be very selective, but I did think Imight find references to three other books that also haveuseful illustrations of plant diseases that complementthose in the `colour handbook'. These are: Zillinsky FJ,1983, Common diseases of small grain cereals: a guideto identification, published by CIMMYT; Roelfs AP,Singh RP, Saari EE, 1992, Rusts of wheat, concepts andmethods of disease management, also published byCIMMYT and McIntosh RA, Wellings RF, Park RF,1995, Wheat rusts, an atlas of resistance genes,published jointly by CSIRO and Kluwer.

These are minor criticisms of a book that I thinkwould be useful to a wide range of people interested inplant diseases, and of cereals in particular, includingstudents and professional pathologists for whom aready reference book for diagnosis would be useful.

Roy Johnson

Plant Pathology (2000) 49, 402

402 Q2000 BSPP