Customer Reviews

Sierra Nevada Wildflowers

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This field guide to the wildflowers of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California -- one of the FalconGuide series -- is terrific. It first introduces you to the geology of the region, defining the types of habitat for the plants, and describes how to identify the plants, including wonderful, careful line drawings of types of leaves and flowers. The book itself is organized by color of the flowers (so the chapters are "Blue and Purple Flowers," "Red and Orange Flowers," and so on), which makes identifying them easier, since their most obvious characteristic comes first. Each of the 230 wildflowers included in the book has a picture and a description, habitat locator, and comment from the author. In addition, the book is very sturdy and well-produced, with excellent photographs of the plants and a strong binding. And here's a neat design feature: the corners are rounded, so they'll never become dog-eared. Up until now on hikes I've admired wildflowers in the abstract; this book makes it easy to appreciate more of what you see.

It's obvious the author of this book knows what she's talking about! In our exploration of the Sierra Nevada we've come across a multitude of flora, but never before did we know what it was. In this book, Karen Weise provdes beautiful photographs along with a complete description of the flower, it's blooming period, habitat/range, and her comments, which include the genus of each plant. Owning this book, I find no need to search for any others. I buy this book for my special friends who share the Sierra Nevada with the flora found there!

I think this is a pretty good book for beginners, but for more advanced flower identification, this book is not that good. First, it is organized by color variation, and not by plant family. Also, there are many species of wildflowers that occur in the sierras that do not appear in this book.

As an example to illustrate how this is a weakness, imagine the following sceanrio:
If you found a yellow flower that was not in the book, you would have a hard time identifying it looking in the 'yellow' section of this book, because closely related species may not be yellow.

The pictures, on the other hand, are very well done. The photos are closeups, and very bright. If you want a basic book this may be the one for you.

Good luck!