BOOK REVIEWS
335
thing rarely if ever seen in books on landscape architecture, a guide to the plants used.
Since every kind of climate and ecological environment is included in this book covering all of China, it would be of great interest to know how botanical variety is adopted in different kinds of gardens.
H. Y. SHIH
Over Hong Kong Lew Roberts, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong 1982, 97 Colour Plates.
Over the last few years the South China Morning Post has published a number of volumes of photographs of the highest quality, both having regard to the photography and to the printing. This volume is almost certainly the best of these, since it is simply by far the best photographic record of Hong Kong yet published.
The 97 plates of this volume are all aerial photographs, and give a very wide ranging view of Hong Kong, with 28 plates of Hong Kong Island, 17 of Kowloon, and 49 of the New Territories, and of subjects ranging from Government House to squatter areas, duck farms, and junk heaps.
Obviously, any volume of aerial photographs is bound to be short on reflections of the human element: a particular problem in a city such as Hong Kong where the vitality, colour, and bustle of the street-level community is so important in the creation of the spirit of the city. By photographing from the air, even though from a low flying aircraft and with razor sharp reproduction, almost all of this street-level vigour is lost. It is very much to Mr. Roberts' credit that, despite this huge disadvantage, he manages to suggest a substantial amount of the human element in his pictures, and in many of them actually manages to provide a new perspective on human activity. Thus, his photographs of the Aberdeen Junk Yards (No. 36) conveys the chaotic, busy nature of those yards perhaps better than any other type of photograph could. His photographs of Ocean Park (No. 39), the Shaw Brothers Studio (Nos. 88 and 89) and a Mai Po marshes village