Essentials of Dravyaguna (Volume 1)

Description

Medicinal plants bear different characters. True identification of the plant is based on the understandings of the family, to which it belongs and some of its own special characters. This book is a bunch of many medicinal plants and covers the essential aspect of a plants nomenclature and morphology. The book titled as Essential of Dravyaguna shows an easy way to differentiate the families that share common characters. The synonyms of the plants described in different lexicons are compiled. The synonyms that depict the morphology are highlighted in this book. Flowers are essential for the identification. This fact is given much importance in this book. An earnest attempt is made to explain the floral characters of each plant. Some clues are given at the end of each plant to understand the plant more clearly. The objective of this book is not to make Dravyaguna complicated, but a ready reference book to get sufficient information on the synonyms, morphology and different varieties of the medicinal plants. This book is all about the name and form of the plants, I highlighted the synonyms that are related to the morphology. Of course, we have a lot of synonyms to describe the plant’s morphology, yet, the support of Botany is essential. Keeping this in the mind, this book is named as Essentials of Dravyaguna. This book contains 51 families of Angiosperms that are included in Ayurvedic Meteriamedica. Chief family characters are given in the bracket, just below the family name. This helps the reader to remember these striking features as the identification tools of the family. An earnest effort is made to describe the meaning of the name of the family at the beginning of the description of each family. When the morphological features are common to 2 or more families, identification largely depends on the differentiating methodologies. Hence, closely related families are differentiated with the help of very important dissimilar factors.

The description of the plant begins by defining the name of the plant. Annotations are given in order to understand the complexity of the plant with respect to its synonyms, varieties and its classification. The botanical description of the plant includes the right terminologies such as Balausta, Lomentum, Regma, Stolon etc. Clues are given at the end of each plant to get additional information on the plant.