Customer Reviews

Field Guide to the Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes of the United States

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For a small, compact field guide it holds a wealth of information including a dichotomous like key for easy identification. Common names as well as scientific names are provided with good illustrations. For anyone serious about field work or just someone interested in plants this book is a good resource.

This book travels well and with the index dog-eared makes for quick and dirty referencing (espeically of Fam Graminae).
But I found a few of the plates, although well illustrated, confusing (i.e. determining the key number associated with the image of a particular flowering head). If you are looking for a thorough reference for Genus Carex don't look here.

I am a professional ecologist and spend at least 100 days a year in the field characterizing vegetation communities and plant species. It is difficult to tell which part of the country this book would be best suited for, as it would be considered incomplete in the areas I have used it in (Northern and Southern Rockies, Black Hills, Intermountain West and Northern Great Plains). I found it's treatment of rushes especially wanting. This book has made it to the field with me only a few times and was seldom used then. The most redeeming quality of this book is it's size, which can easily fit into a back pocket, but when it's taken out you will probably not be able to key the more difficult and uncommon graminiods found in the U.S.

This book is suitable for a first introduction to the grasses and their relatives, but nothing more. The other reviewers here are correct when they say that the book is of limited use for serious work, but then I have those books too, and they're about 900 pages long and weigh many pounds, and don't travel well. The treatment of carex or the sedges is limited as people have said, but carex has many species and a small book like this just isn't going to cut it, but as I said, professional level graminology books are going to weigh even more than your usual taxonomic book because just the grass family itself has about 14,000 species.

The illustrations are well done, though, and there is some knowledge to be gleaned from the book. But use it as a stepping stone to other more advanced works on the grasses. The four volume work by the Smithsonian on the grasses of America is one of the big, weighty one that I was referring to, and that's worth acquiring if you're serious. These are large format volumes and very heavy, so the problem there is that they don't travel well.

For helping you learn about the grasses, I would recommend you buy Agnes Chases's wonderful little book, A First Book of Grasses, to learn about them first. She takes a conceptual, top-down approach, teaching you the basic concepts of grass structure on which the keys are ultimately based, and after that, you can start using the keys with much more confidence. For example, starting from the premise that the grass spikelet is a reduced, leafy, flowering branch, she leads you from the most basic spikelets, such as those in Festuca, to the most modified or complex ones that show the greatest deviation from the basic spikelet plan. After reading her book through several times, I found I could identify many grasses to the genus level just by eyeballing them, and then I could drill down to the species from there.

The bottom line is that becoming a good field graminologist is just something that takes special study and effort. I learned to be able to key out just about anything in the group in about a month of intensive study of the books, plus several hours a day working in the field. And by "the field," I mean the sand lots near my house, and several local parks, and people's front yards. The nice thing about the grasses is that even an apparently dull, boring sand lot devoid of pretty flowers or trees can provide you with hours of fun trying to identify the grasses. It can be learned but it's something you'll probably need to allot some separate time to from the rest of your work and/or studies, but you can get a significant leg up on the topic just working around your own neighborhood.

I have owned this book for 10 years. I think it is a great little book! It is easy to bring in the field and it covers most species I encounter in the northeast. The plates and descriptions are not always on the same pages so you have to make sure you are referencing to the correct plate number and it does not illustrate all plants listed. You need to have the fruit of the plant to use this reference.

great drawings depicting mst abundant species although they just go to descriptions for the more rare species.

good price, good on grasses less on sedges and rushs.

The book is perhaps of historical interest and contains some adequate illustrations that may help you recoginize some genera. It is, however, fairly useless for identification to the species level.

Helped me a lot, but mostly as a compliment to Lauren Brown's Grass ID guide. This one is more technical and has fewer descriptions, but more species.

Decent book, the sketches are very helpful for attempting to key out species.

This book is very basic and doesn't give much if you are not familiar with the terminology used for grasses, sedges and rushes. Has a basic key to seperate the grasses, sedges and rushes and then a more detailed key for the Graminae, which leads you to plates of specific species (has common names too) with okay line drawings that can be confusing on occasion. Otherwise, may help the amature and/or botanist looking for a complementary guide for other references.