Customer Reviews

Trees of New England: A Natural History

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

 

 

When looking for a New England tree field guide, I chose this book over "Native and Naturalized Trees of New England and Adjacent Canada: A Field Guide" by DeGraaf and Sendak because "Trees of New England" appeared to have more and better illustrations. A closer inspection proved that "Trees" didn't have as many as I thought. While this is my biggest criticism of the work, they can be forgiven because this book isn't primarily a field guide, but a natural history book. Also, what illustrations it does have are of exceptional quality. Amelia Hansen should be commended. I will look for other books that she has worked on.

One thing that struck me was frequent references to other books that I have read, like Tom Wessels' "Reading the Forested Landscape" and Bernd Heinrich's "The Trees in my Forest", both very special works. "Trees", however, should have come first. While Wessels, Heinrich, and others will layer rich detail about specific trees or situations, they don't give the reader an overall picture of area trees. Hence, I needed a field guide.

Charles Fergus lists 75 native trees and 15 common introduced species, tells us about their size, range, and other basic information, then gives us some history and maybe tells us about his personal experience with it. I much appreciated the inclusion of lumber uses of the tree. This information is given primarily in paragraph form rather than chart form, which can make a quick lookup difficult. He will repeat himself from section to sections, which can be a little annoying if you read the book cover to cover like I did, but necessary for those who read the sections reference style.

If I were to nitpick, I would have grouped the Populus trees together (aspens, cottonwoods, and poplar), included the introduced trees in the main section rather than in a chapter in the back, and included more of Amelia's wonderful illustrations. The first two nits, I realize, are personal preference, and the last might have made the book larger and more expensive than the publisher might have wanted. This book offers great foundation knowledge and more. Not entirely a natural history book, not exactly a field guide, but a great balance between them.

This book is an interesting read; it's not a field guide. General facts are told about the trees and sometimes personal observations or stories.

Each tree has a map showing the region it grows in and one or two hand drawn black line illustrations per species. There are not enough illustrations nor are they consistent enough to double as a field guide. For example some illustrations show the full tree giving us a sense of the shape while others show just the leaf and other times, the bark. I wish each of these types of visuals was included for every tree.

If you are interested in medicinal uses or practical uses for the trees, i.e. which are good for home heat firewood burning or which are used for making wood furniture and so forth, only some trees have that information. Sometimes how the tree was used by Native Americans is included (but not always).

If you want to know more about trees than a regular field guide teaches you and you are interested in trees of New England you'll want to read this book. Anyone who can't get enough information about trees would feel this is necessary for their library.

I'm rating this 4 stars = I Like It because the text is interesting and provides details that I have not found in other books. The reason I'm not giving it 5 stars = I Love It, is I wish it had more illustrations showing the full tree shape, the leaf, the bark and the fruit or nut if applicable.