Customer Reviews

Wild Flowers of North Carolina: Also covering Virginia, South Carolina, and areas of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware

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

 

 

This guidebook to wild flowers in North Carolina has about 500 species illustrated, each with a description and a small photograph of the flower and plant. The guide deserves high marks for the number of species included and the scholarship which went into describing each by location, blooming date, and other information. Brief tidbits concerning medicinal uses, edibiity, and folklore of the plant are included in many descriptions. Indexed are both scientific and common names of each plant.

However, the guide is nearly worthless for the field identification of flowers. There needs to be some sort of key or pattern to help with identification. There seems no rhyme nor reason I can discern with the order in which the flowers are described. It would be a lot better if the flowers were grouped by blooming date and color, e.g. yellow flowers that appear in May should be together as should purple flowers blooming in September.

So, if you want to go into your backyard and identify what is blooming there you will need a field guide, not this book.

Smallchief

This is a good book to bring along on day hikes. Clear photos and identifying information. It is not about gardening wildflowers.

I have to agree with the review of Smallchief and I will elaborate. In general, an okay book, however, the organization follows that of the "Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas" by Radford, A.E., H.E. Aheles and C.R. Bell. 1968, 1138 pp (Manual). I do not own the Manual, therefore, I do not know the layout but I can say that if you are not a seasoned botanist neither of these books will be easy to use in the field or at home for that matter. Plain and simple, the "Wild Flowers of North Carolina" has no useful organization of the plants to assist amateur individuals looking to identify wild flowers in the field. You'll find yourself flipping back and forth in the book to find the flower you're standing in front of trying to identify. Typically only one picture per species and some are too far away not giving you much to help identify picture wise. The authors use a "Key Characters Summary Code" which I find difficult to use. You will not find the flowers organized by flower color or an alphabetical taxonomic listing and I do not know if the plants follow a phylogenetic arrangement either but I doubt it. Unless you own the Manual this book may not be the best choice but even if you own the Manual I can't see it making things much easier unless you like to constantly cross-reference. Why the authors chose to do this I do not know but it makes no sense other than to get individuals to buy both books because they have a common coauthor. Maybe it was just easier for the authors to compile the book this way. Ironically, in the Introduction the authors state "Our goal in this presentation of 500 native or naturalized plants in North Carolina is to open eyes, minds, and hearts to the story of the state's wild flowers, their beauty, there interesting attributes, their uses, and in many cases, their plight." Indeed this book contains much useful information, however, the book in no way makes it easy for individuals to reach the goals of the authors as stated above unless you're a sit at home, book studying, amateur wildflower enthusiast/botanist.

On some positive notes regarding this book, it has some useful Appendixes as follows: 1) Horticultural Chart for Native North Carolina Wild Flowers. 2) Endangered and Threatened North Carolina Wild Flowers. 3) Nomenclatural Changes for North Carolina Wild Flowers. Perhaps, if you have access to the Manual then this book would be a useful companion.

This is a "classic botanical handbook" published by The University of North Carolina Press presenting 500 native or naturalized plants of the almost 3000 flowering plants reported to grow in North Carolina in The Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas by Radford et al. Besides the plant descriptions supplemented with photographs, it contains cross references to the Manual that might come in handy for botany students and professionals with access to that 1200+ page tome, horticultural information useful for native gardens, and an index with both common and scientific names to look up plant species. However, it is not organized as a field guide and I doubt the authors intended it to be used that way. This is primarily a reference book.

There is a lot of information in this book, including the status of plants (rare, endangered etc), medicinal and poisonous plants, light and moisture requirements, whether plants are suitable/available for cultivation etc. However, much of this info is coded in letters, numbers and symbols on the plant descriptions and requires some effort to decode. The key character codes are provided on two pages in the front and back of the book with line drawings to illustrate and a 10 cm ruler that might come in handy to measure plant parts. The other codes and symbols used are explained on pages xxii and xxiii of the introduction. Thus, looking up the codes on a plant description requires flipping back and forth between several places in the book, which is rather inconvenient. I wished all the codes were presented on one page. You can make accessing this information much easier for you by copying/scanning the code explanations onto one page and printing it out as a bookmark that you can have side-by-side with the plant description you are reading.

The order of the plant descriptions seems to follow taxonomic groupings in the same order as the Manual and plant family members are listed together. There are no dichotomous keys or groupings of photos by characteristics (e.g. flower color) that would allow easy identification of plants. Thus, this book is not really suited as a field guide - certainly not for the lay person with little background knowledge in botany and plant taxonomy. The pictures are smallish (smaller than credit card size) but generally good quality representations of the plants showing flowers and foliage, often also fruits and berries.

In summary, this is a very useful reference book for the hobby botanist and native gardener. If you are willing to put in the work in decoding the information, there is a lot to be extracted from this book. It is not, however, easily used as a field guide. If you have little background knowledge and are looking for a simple "what plant is that" type book to take on a hike, there are other books better suited for that.

This has been very useful over the last five years since moving to North Carolina.
I am a nature freak and like to find out the names and details of what I am seeing.

Wonderful Book. First Edition had larger photographs, but still a lovely book. Love the addition of the uses of some plants.

Excellent reference book for use in describing flowers growing in North Carolina at certain times of year.