ANOTHER LIFE: NOW THAT autumn seems bent on sliding seamlessly into spring, it can take half the winter for some plants to slow down. My morning trips to the raingauge wear a deepening trail in the grass. But most wayside plants, I am pleased to see, are still crumpling on seasonal cue, retiring to rest in root-buds, rhizomes, belly-button rosettes.

Everything gloriously blossoms again, however, in two new books among the Christmas offerings, both of them county floras with appeal and importance far beyond their borders. John Feehan's The Wildflowers of Offaly (Offaly County Council, [euro]40) and Tony O'Mahony's Wildflowers of Cork City and County (Collins Press, [euro]29.99) are weighty, handsome hardbacks, funded jointly by their local authorities and the Heritage Council - an uplifting enterprise, given the times.

Neither book should be confused with flower identification guides - in different ways, both are enriching, eager works of botany. One offers deep acquaintance with the flowers themselves, the other is more conventionally concerned with where they grow and how they're faring.

John Feehan, UCD ecologist and writer, has his home in Birr, and lifelong devotion to his county's great outdoors shines through his images (the wing petals of the early marsh orchid "are held at the angle of a hovering kestrel"). Much of his book - packed with fine photographs and illustrations - is all about looking (with a hand- lens, if necessary) at the inner world of flowers: the ingenious anatomy, architecture, engineering that give each plant its individual "personality" and serve its constant changes, from budburst to pollination to the ripening and launching of seeds.

Once, painting a vase of nasturtiums over a period of a day or two, I was quite disconccrted by their insistence on shuffling around with the light. "The life of a flower," writes Feehan, "can be compared to the movement of a ballerina in slow, slow motion" and, like Darwin, he has clearly spent many hours, even days, observing some exquisite choreography.

"What happens next," he writes, as Herb Robert ripens its seeds, "is well worth the patience required to observe it" - whereupon, slowly stretching five catapults, the plant sets about firing its progeny for six metres or more.

Such up-close-and-personal engagement with flowers is enriched from the studies of Darwin and other great botanists of the past. Some of them were prompted by the explorations of herbal medicine, and Feehan, like Tony O'Mahony, attends to those uses and traditions. Both authors describe many of the non-native flowers that have naturalised in Ireland - but it is O'Mahony who gets really upset about some of them.