Plants and Trees Books

"Shrubs of the Great Basin" is a wonderful, extensively informative textbook for individuals interested in identifying shrubs throughout the southwestern United States. Organized by family, this is a wonderful textbook for botanists and flora enthusiasts. Fleischmann incorporates historical and detailed information not typically unearthed in field guides. In addition to illustrations of each species, the author includes 24 pages of wonderful photographs of numerous shrubs detailed throughout the text. Overall, an excellent and informational book.

This is a classic from the McGraw - Hill Forestry Series. I first used this back in the 60's as a forestry student. The changes are all for the best.

I would strongly recommend this to the student of dendrology in the northeast. It's one of the few texts which you will use throughout your career.

A very useful and worthwhile book. It contains information about many natural areas that are not well-described in other readily available sources, and is particularly valuable for people with an interest in forest and plant ecology and botany. Its only major weakness seems to be in the lack of detailed maps showing trails and specific locations within different national forests.

Collins Tree Guide has amazing drawings of twigs, leafs and overall tree shape. I use this book in my Woody Plant classes at Temple University because there are few books that have detailed drawings of tree twigs for winter identification. Although some trees in this book do not grow in our Northeastern US Region, the acurracy of the ones that do grow here make the book well worth having in your reference library.

...cause this is what this really is. Really good catalog. "Build your own treehouse" has more practical advices, in fact it's photo guide to build a treehouse. No need to have them both.
This one has general advice about building. And nice pics of built tree houses.
Overall, nice book, but not a "musthave".

This book's strength is its pictures - realistic representations of dry California landscape plants. I would use it as a "brainstorm" book for getting ideas on which species to use in a particular landscape. The notations for each species are also helpful. Definitely one for the library.

Designed as a local supplement to what is now 'Trees_in_Canada' (aka 'Trees of the Northern United States and Canada') this book went through five editions before being extensively revised by the present author. This work goes deeply into the shrubs and subshrubs of BC and although it is not in the same league as 'Trees in Canada' it does look good.

It is a handy size, perhaps a trifle large for use in the field, but its nicely rounded corners compensate significantly. All the species treated are illustrated by a line drawing, which tries to keep a balance between giving botanical detail and giving an all-over morphological image and succeeds fairly well at this. In addition a section of color half tones is provided, which (as so often in this sort of book) gives the impression of having been added as an afterthought. These pictures would have benefitted from being printed at a, say, 30% higher magnification and against a lighter colored background: as it is these tend to drown in the all black pages. Nevertheless occasionally these color pictures do contribute.

This book is excellent for learning more about specific trees of the Great Lakes Region. It goes into much more detail than any field guide will ever tell you. The book spends 2 pages per tree, detailing the life history characteristics and typical habitats that the trees will be found in. I particularly like the fact that for each tree you can see a photo of the entire tree, as well as close ups of the bark and leaves (sometimes fruit too). The book provides satisfactory descriptions for identifying trees; however, does not provide any way to "key out" trees, so you must have some idea what you are looking at before you refer to the book. As a student in Ecology, I have found this book ten times more valuable than the price; however, I found that I needed an additional field guide to key out unknown trees in the field.

This is a botanical reference work on the trees of Southern Africa (mostly S-Africa & Rhodesia/Zimbabwe?). Its printing history speaks for itself. First published in 1977; second revised edition by Dr E.J.Moll in 1984, third impression 1988 (when 12 pages were added with updates on nomenclature); ninth impression in 1997. What can I add to that?

This is an identification key and reference work to Southern African trees, giving per species a short description, a distribution map and one (or more) line drawings of a detail, usually a leaf (sometimes a fruit, sometimes both. Upon occasion a tree habit). Names listed include full scientific name, in some cases synonyms, always an english name and usually an afrikaans name. There are close to a thousand pages of this, supplemented with over a hundred pages of color illustrations (both photographs and colored drawings).

Compared to some of the magnificently illustrated books on trees that are now available this work looks somewhat modest. However the absence of an abundance of photographs does mean that all these trees can be captured in a single binding of a handy size and weight, at a quite affordable price. [Might be due for an update, but I sure won't volunteer to undertake it. That would be a whole lot of work! ]

Great for the occasional hiker strolling thru the woods and wondering, "i wonder what kind of tree that is"? good illustrations esp. illustrations of bark(which are usually hard to draw). spend a couple of bucks, it will make you hike a whole lot more interesting.....