Customer Reviews

Plants Of The Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia & Alaska

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is simply the best field guide on any subject I have ever encountered. Photos are clear and often come in both full plant and detail perspectives; text is accurate, clear, well-written, and thorough; and the book is intuitively organized, providing easy-to-use keys, and a text-alongside-photo format that means less page flipping in the field. The cover is water-resistant, too! Packs an amazing number of plant species, including many bryophytes and lichens, as well as ferns and seed-bearing plants. Even covers many grasses! I live in California, and although many of the plants in this book don't reach down to my area, it is still the first field guide I pick up when trying to key a plant, because I am almost sure to get the family here, and usually the genus as well. Once you have those, it's much easier to cross-reference to your local species and varieties. If you didn't love plants obsessively before, this book will make you want to start!

For anyone interested in Northwest Native Plants, this is an essential reference. Arthur Lee Jacobsen's "Wild Plants of Greater Seattle" is another useful book, although not as detailed. "Vascular plants of the Pacific Northwest", by Charles Leo Hitchcock, in 7 volumes for $300.00, is much more detailed but not as handy. I have used my "Pojar" so much that I wore it out and had to get a second copy. I found it useful when I was just beginning to learn about native plants, and now that I can identify over 200 species on sight, I still use it to learn about ethnobotany, which plants are edible, and where to plant them in my garden.

Another reviewer complained that the book does not list common names in the index. This is just plain wrong. You can look up plants in the index by common name or scientific name, or you can browse through the photos until you get a match. You can also use the keys, which is the best way to learn about the relationship of one species to another, but I'm usually too lazy to work through the process. The way the plants are grouped, it's easy to narrow it down and find your plant.

My one complaint about the book is that it is sometimes difficult to pin down whether or not a particular plant is actually a native. This is usually implied, especially when they tell how indigenous peoples used the plants in everday life, but I wish the plants were clearly marked Native and Non-Native.

This is one book that travels with us wherever we drive; it is filled with bookmarks & scribbled observations whenever we've seen something new to add to Messrs. Pojar & MacKinnon's awesome efforts. Naturally they alone did not compile this book & it is an impressive & accurate effort of a large collection of dedicated people.An easy-to-use field guide featuring close to 800 species of flora commonly found from Oregon to Alaska, including trees, shrubs, wildflowers, aquatics, grasses, ferns, mosses & lichens. From shoreline to alpine, including the Olympics & the western Cascades. The perfect gift for anyone who wanders the land!..............

I have about thirty field guides on geology, fungi, plants, and wildlife generally focusing on the Northwest. I consider this to be best field guide of all - the standard by which other field guides should be measured. It is fairly comprehensive. It is concise and user-friendly. The color photographs are generally guide good. It even has occasional bits of interesting trivia to help you get familiar with the plant in question. I have heard from a biology student that there were a couple minor inaccuracies in the taxonomic classification, but unless you are a professional whose career depends on total precision, this book is your best bet. Buy it and get out and get to know your land a little better. Have fun but stay on the trails!

I have almost 100 different plant identification guides alone; some quite specialized (such as the ones I have on lichens, mycology, or marine algae), and others more general, and this is probably the best general guide organized by region that I have. I like it even better than the Audubon Society Pacific Coast guide, or their Forests, Western Region, Guide, which are also useful books, but as they cover both animals and plants, of course the coverage can't be as complete on the plants as this book is.

The nature photography in these books just gets better over the years, and this book is no exception. The photos are truly excellent, and the identification notes in books like these have also improved substantially over the years. This book is no exception. I was formally trained in botany and plant taxonomy for a while, almost completing a master's degree in the subject once, and I feel I know a good plant guide when I see it, and this is a fine book.

Unless you want to get into truly professional-level plant taxonomies, which would usually require separate books on trees, flowers, lichens, etc., not to mention the greater technical knowlege required, I think this is the best overall identification guide around. It can't cover everything, of course, but it covers the most important and most common species. Overall, this is a quality guide and a great book to take with you on trips, hikes, outings, or whatever.

I used this book extensively in a field class this summer and it was extremely helpful. Everything I would possibly want to know about NW flora was included in detail (even with sketches of individual leaves). Also, the ethnographic information regarding the uses of various herbal medicines was fascinating.

I purchased this field guide to assist me in finding edible wild plants. Well, it does that and much much more. All those blasted plants I can't find in any other book are here, and it's nice to know how they were used by the native americans in some cases. Obviously this book was not published as a wild foods guide, and for that reason it should never be your only guide if your using it as such. Having said that, there are so many plants in here that can't be found in any wild foods guide on the market. Plus the book will tell you if something is toxic, what or if it can be used for something outside of being a food source, and most wild food guides just don't do that. I highly recommend this book to all people living in the pacific northwest. You should have some idea of what is around you just in case. Plus, even if you have next to no interest in plant life I can next to guarantee you'll find this book at least interesting enough to keep as bathroom reading. Yes, this book is good enough to grab the interest of someone who has no interest in the subject.

If you want a single field guide to the flora of the Pacific Northwest coast this would be an excellent choice. It covers everything from trees to mosses and lichens. There are color photographs, descriptions, and habitat notations of the common plant species with descriptions of less-common species included in the text. The coverage appears to be fairly complete for the geographic range of the book which extends from south-central Alaska to central Oregon but only as far inland as the crest of the coastal mountains. When they say "the Pacific Northwest Coast", they mean it. Therefore it would not be especially useful for identifying many inland species. If you do a lot of exploring inland in eastern Oregon, Washington, and/or British Columbia this might not be your best choice for a field guide.

Names native tribes of the Northwest and describes how they used each plant, and presents most entries with either color photographs or drawings, covering everything from large trees down to grasses, sedges, lichens and mosses. The habitat and geographic subregion of each species is given.

I wanted a guide to help me identify all the flora on my property after moving here from the Midwest. But I have found it to be a great thing to have along while hiking, too. The historical and cultural tidbits are a very nice touch.