Customer Reviews

Aquatic and Wetland Plants of Northeastern North America, Volume I: A Revised and Enlarged Edition of Norman C. Fassett's A Manual of Aquatic Plants, ... Gymnosperms, and Angiosperms: Dicotyledons

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Because the volumes use keys and employ technical botanical terms, they are more useful for people with some background in plant identification. There are illustrations (of variable quality and utility), but these are not books that you can thumb through to identify specimens. All of the species included are wetland species and it is a nice idea to have them in a single reference.
My main complaints with the volumes are: 1) they do not contain all the wetland species you are likely find in a wetland and do not indicate where they are incomplete. You could easily key out a specimen and come up with an incorrect identification because you have a species they omitted; 2) there are always some non-wetland species in a wetland and these are not covered in the volumes. Again you can come up with an incorrect identification.
For these reasons the volumes make false identifications likely. And, if you can recognize when they are leading you astray, you've already passed through the level where they could be useful.

Speaking as a naturalist, I find both Volume 1 and Volume 2 of this series are excellent books. They are not field guides though, and the illustrations are black-and-white line drawings, so if what you are looking for is a pocket field guide these are not the books for you.

The information is well presented and the illustrations are clear. The keys are focused on distinctive features and are easy to follow. That being said, these books are best used by someone with at least some botanical background, and they wee originally written back in the 1950s. They have been updated, but our understanding of the relationships between plant species changes rapidly and some of the names may be older ones, and some of the species may have been broken into several different species since the writing of these books.



If you are a naturalist, botanist, or just interested in wetland plants these are great books.