Customer Reviews

Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is probably the most useful book for anyone involved in plant identification, such as Forest Engineers, specially those working in tropical America, where one often encounters many kinds of palms in the field, but until now it was not easy to identify them, and palms are mostly overlooked because they have the reputation of being difficult to identify. This book changes it all, and it's definitely a must-have.

if you're interested in neotropical palms, you ought to buy this excellent guide. all three authors are considered to be highly esteemed authorities who know their stuff very well. the description said it had approximately 380 pages, but together with all the appendices and photo pages, the total number of pages gets to 500.

Palms are a very conspicuous feature of the tropical landscape, whether in the wilds of Central and South America or in the suburban environments further north. They are also important economically (usually as fruit crops) and culturally (having uses as diverse as roofing, as material for weaving hammocks as fodder for edible beetle larvae!). Since everyone knows what a palm is, yet most non-specialists cannot get much beyond that, this guide to their identification should fill a niche.

This is a field guide to the 550 species of palm occurring naturally in the American tropics. The taxonomic treatment seems to this non-specialist to be eminently sensible and many knotty systematic probems appear to have been carefully resolved. A 40 page appendix of accepted names helps clarify what has happened to some of the older synonyms, hybrid names and such.

The authors have crammed an awful lot of new and useful information into the three-hundred and fifty odd pages. A main key permits identification to genera with further keys sprinkled throughout the body of the book. There are handy introductions to families and genera. The text is succinct and well oriented towards field identification while the 236 photographs at the back allow the user to quickly narrow down the search by visual means. Maps are provided for every species - this must have been a huge task! - and country checklists provide a further tool for homing in on the plant in question.

In resume, this is a master work which will be seen in the field for decades to come. It should be high on the list of any tropical landscape gardener, horticulturalist, anthropologist, botanist or naturalist.

"Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas". Well researched, informative book on the Palms of the America's, a little knowledge of palms makes this even better for the reader.

Overall it would say that it 's the excellent job that authors has put together all the description of American palm species. It would be welcome among serious palm collectors as well as reserchers.

The only thing I don't like about this book and I think it is controversial among palm colleectors is that the book tends to lump down many named species into a synonymous for example, a genus Coccothrinax or the palms in the Attalea Group. Though not all of the recorded species are really distinct from each other, many of them are quite different and should be separately treated at least in a variety level i.e., genus Acrocomia which authors has lumped from 26 recorded species inot only 2 species. This is however not explicitly stated there at all.

I use this book for field work, and it seems not fair that a book of three authors, appears as a one-author book, I know the other two people and they are scientist and work in the palms (Arecaceae) as well as Mr Henderson.