Flora of the Santa Cruz Mountains of California: A Manual of the Vascular Plants [Paperback]

John Thomas (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (May 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804718628
• ISBN-13: 978-0804718622
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,985,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Indispensible Work for the Committed Landowner, April 10, 2004

By 

Mark Vande Pol (Los Gatos, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flora of the Santa Cruz Mountains of California: A Manual of the Vascular Plants (Paperback)

I am a property owner in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This flora has been indispensable to me as a guide by which to restore my land. Its keys are, for the most part, comprehensible and useful to the amateur. Its detailed references to where the plants were found are a blessing in a region with enormous climate and soil variations. It is purely a scientific work by a man who loved the land.

The Santa Cruz Mountains have an incredibly complex flora. They are located at the confluence of three major botanical regions: North Coast, Central Coast, and Inland. As a consequence, a single parcel can have a bewildering array of plants. On my fourteen acres alone, I have distinguished over 240 species, of which 60 are exotics. Without a good flora, I would be lost, killing things that are native and letting exotics pass simply because the task of weeding is so physically and intellectually overwhelming.

The rewards of this kind of work can be equally overwhelming, and I owe a personal debt to botanists such as Thomas. I am astonished that this was but a graduate dissertation. I can only say that I wish his ability, integrity, and energy was more common.

Modern flora, although blessed with the benefit of DNA analysis, can be needlessly complicated with innumerable "subspecies" that, from my observations, may only be hybrids or simply variants based upon distinctions important only to the professional career of the botanist. Although Thomas' book may be in that respect somewhat dated, it is also a blessing. I am often faced with making distinctions on attributes belonging to separate "species" that are shared by individuals on the same parcel! Jepson, while equally indispensable and supposedly definitive, can, in that respect, be maddening. "Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region," by Beldeman and Kolzoff and "Coastal County Plants from Santa Cruz to Mendocino," by George Pikkaranien, although less comprehensive than Jepson, are, in some respects, more useful, if only because of the photographs and references to attrributes of typical habitat.

I use Thomas, Pikkaranien, and Beldeman/Kolzoff to get close with my identification, confirm it with the CalFlora web site (where the photographs are usually poor), and complete the identification process using Jepson, both the text and the online version, which sometimes don't agree. My only criticism of Thomas is that I wish there were more of those excellent drawings.