Customer Reviews

Spring Wildflowers of New England

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

 

 

If you want to know what is blooming in your New England surroundings, this is the book to reach for. Arranged by season and color with color illustrations as well as both common and latin names, this book can satisfy any level of naturalist's curiousity. It is great to see this hard to find volume back in print and in hardcover to hold up in the field!

First, let's look at the strengths of Marilyn Dwelley's "Spring Wildflowers of New England". The illustrations are excellent, extremely simple to grasp and showing enough detail to "rough out" the identification of the majority of flowers one is likely to see, without a lot of extraneous background material seen in many photographic collections. Second, its small size makes it useful for the field. Third, the index is pretty complete, allowing you to look up many flowers by multiple common names as well as the official Latin nomenclature.

The weaknesses are also significant. There is no introduction to speak of but, rather, the book simply opens with one page of definitions, then a stream of flowers. There is no attempt to divide flowers up by anything but color; with so many white flowers, some attention to grouping by size or form would make identification more manageable. There is little information on many flowers other than their form and presentation in the wild, while for others there are comments about edibility, folklore, etc. Also, the division of flowers into color groups is slightly peculiar as she includes red flowers in the pink group and violet flowers with the blue group. And some guides contradict her comments such as regarding the edibility of the May-apple fruit. BUT, overall, despite my negative comments, I like this guide (I bought it, didn't I?) and would recommend it to be used with a bulkier guide, like the Audobon series book, as a backup for more detailed information.

This is a must have book for all outdoor types. Pages are color coded at the corners for fast reference!!!

The book I was looking for was out of print. I found it priced very reasonably on Amazon. It arrived in two days and I was ready for my course on wildflowers and I have a valuable reference for the future.