Roger Camp’s 500 Flowers, published by Dewi Lewis in 2005, is a hardback volume of seventy-two pages built around forty-eight colour photographs. Camp works digitally, composing varieties of plant species into collages whose colour is the first thing a reader notices. The book’s square format, twenty-five centimetres to a side, suits these constructed views: the images read as deliberate arrangements rather than field records, and the sequencing carries the eye across species and seasons. An index at the back identifies each of the five hundred flowers shown, giving the pictures a reference apparatus that most floral albums lack.

Camp is not a newcomer to this territory. He has received the Leica Medal of Excellence, and his earlier book Butterflies appeared under the Thames & Hudson imprint; his photographic study of the natural world has been shown in exhibitions and reproduced in magazines and books. That background matters here, because 500 Flowers is not a casual gathering of pretty blooms. The collage method is a decision about how nature is seen — assembled, compared, made legible as pattern — and it places the book closer to constructed still life than to documentary botany.

For collectors, the appeal lies in that combination of method and apparatus: a single photographer’s sustained inquiry, reproduced in colour, with an index that turns a picture book into something to consult. It occupies a modest but distinct place in the flowering of digitally made photobooks in the mid-2000s, and its cross-over audience — photographers, gardeners, general readers — is a sign of how comfortably it moves between categories. This is a book to keep for the pictures and to use for the names.