This CD-ROM, produced in Germany by a consultancy specializing in herbal remedies, is a rather nattily designed library of herbal medicines, encompassing folk, herbal (Western, Indian and Chinese) and homeopathic medicine. In fact there are two parallel libraries: a botanical one and medicinal. For instance, the plant Aesculus hippocastanum L. (Linnaeus) is cross-referenced to the drugs Hippocastani folium (horse chestnut leaves) and Hippocastani semen (horse chestnut seeds). The initial display is long and narrow, taking up about 8 cm of the left-hand side of the screen. It is simply designed and nicely colour- coded, in two languages, English (which reads very well) and German.

The ‘Plants’ menu is searchable either by scientific name or vernacular name, the latter includes Indian names as well as German, English and other European familiar names. The use of search strings speeds things up, the name you’re after being narrowed down as each letter is typed, or you can go straight to the starting letter by clicking on an alphabetical table. Searching the scientific names can be restricted to specific families of plants, such as the Solanaceae, or by language for the vernacular names. The list is comprehensive, containing over 900 plants; 16 different species of Aconite were listed, for instance. It includes poisonous plants only used in folk medicine and homeopathy, such as Actaea spicata (ominously marked with a skull and crossbones)!

Once your plant of interest has been selected, its name appears in a ‘Display’ box which when clicked, brings up a second window containing the information for that plant. I couldn’t quite understand why the extra click was needed, other than to ensure you had the plant you wanted; a direct click would surely have been as good. But this was a minor irritation.