Customer Reviews

Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The title says it all. This is an illustrated glossary to the terms you may encounter while identifying plants. It is beautifully illustrated and the definitions are clear and concise. The book takes much of the pain out of using an identification key and is tremendously useful for both professionals and students.

I disagree with a previous reviewer who characterized this book as "shallow" because it doesn't include detailed information about the terms included. That's kind of like labeling a dictionary as "shallow" because it doesn't provide encyclopedic entries. "Plant Identification Terminology" isn't intended to be a comprehensive guide to plant morphology.

This is a wonderful book at a surprisingly reasonable price and for its intended purpose it is the only game in town - nothing else even comes close.

I am a plant community ecologist that prides myself in knowing many of the plants in the Intermountain West. However, myself and students are always finding new plants, especially as we move into new areas. My primary plant keys are the Intermountain Flora and Plants of the Pacific Northwest. Since I only key a couple months out of the year I forget many of the terms, needing a refresher as I start back out in the spring (my students call it winter death). My students and I find this book very useful and easy to use, particarly for beginning students. It is always with us in the field.

Very good visual and textual descriptions of plant parts-essential to working through a plant key. I recommend it for my college plant id lab.

This is the kind of book every beginning botanist ought to have. Directing an herbal medicine school, I teach people how to use a technical key, in our case "Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas." Having this book at hand means that my students don't have to memorize the 30 different ways that a leaf can be hairy -- pubescent, tomentose, scurfy, etc.

For those of us who aren't botany majors (and maybe some who are), having this book at your side while keying out a plant is indispensable. Can't think of another book like it.

This is a great terminology dictionary. For anyone trying to use the Radford book (manual of the vascular flora of the carolinas) or any similar book, this is a wonderful aid. Keys are often hard to use without knowing complete plant vocabulary, and this book covers everything I've ever encountered. The diagrams are particulary helpful in this book. For example, if you need to know if a leaf is sagittate or hastate and the book says (and it does) Sagittate: "arrowhead-shaped, with the basal lobes directed downward" and Hastate: "arrowhead-shaped, but with the basal lobes turned outward rather than downward; halberd-shaped" you may not be sure which your plant is, but both have very good diagrams to show the difference. Small things like which way the lobes are turned can make a big difference in keying plants, and sometimes a picture is worth a definition rather than a thousand words.

The second edition differs from the first mainly in a revision of the line-drawings which constitute the illustrations. In addition some entries were added and a much brighter cover was adopted.

This is a great book for quickly making sure of a not entirely familiar term. This of course is also the big limitation: there is very little background info, which makes it a pretty shallow work. The idea of shallowness is reinforced since it indeed is written purely from a phytographer's point of view: it is limited to morphology only. When I have a real question I turn to Bell's "Plant_Form" which contains much more information. As I said this is a great book for a quick check, but nothing beyond that.

If you need to identify any plants using a taxonomic key or any other botanical guide, this book helps enormously to clarify the technical terms. It's like learning another language and this book is your dictionary.

Botany books use too many big words and not enough illustrations. This book clarifies the meanings of those big words with attractive drawings.

I wish I had this when I first started learning about plant identification. It is much easier to understand the native tongue when have an idea of a taxonomists lexicon. Nearly every entry in the 'plant dictionary' has a nice clear illustration further helping the reader. Plant ID is not easy, but better to go into it prepared with this sort of tool.

I had to buy this book for a class, and it turned out to be a really valuable resource. It's clearly laid out, and there are nice pen and ink illustrations for almost every entry.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who needs an easy to use reference for anything plant related.