Customer Reviews

Wildflowers of the Eastern United States (Wormsloe Foundation Publications)

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

 

 

Wilbur Duncan is professor emeritus of botany at the Univeristy of Georgia, and with his wife, Marion, have travelled extensively through the eastern US photographing and studying the plants. This book is essentially an update to his 1978 Wildflowers of the Southeast United States, expanded to include the area east of the Mississippi River.

Note to begninners and novices: this is a pretty heavy-duty book, no shortcuts to get to the flower by color or leaf. If you ID the "thumb-through" method, it will take time as there are 630 species with photographs. That's a lot to thumb through. The first portion of the book is descriptions of the species (631) arranged by family and genus. So a working knowledge of scientific names at the family and genus level is a very big help. All the photographs are labelled ONLY with scientific names. Trying it out on a total beginner and a novice taught me that scientific names are a hindrance to easy learning, BUT, if you really want to know what species you are looking at, it is an absolute necessity. That's why it's for the SERIOUS enthusiast.

Scott Ranger

I echo the previous review - this book is heavy duty for beginners and there are a lot of pictures to thumb through. However, I'm a beginner beginner and I had a lot of flower pictures I had taken that I wanted to identify. This book was a great help, along with Audubon's Field Guide to North American Wildflowers. This book covers much that theirs doesn't - not a whole lot of overlap between the two - so they're very complementary. If you don't mind taking the time to go through the EXCELLENT pictures, this is a very good reference - especially for someone who know next to nothing about wildflowers such as myself.

This is probably an excellent guide to eastern wildflowers, but it's not for the beginner, more for the person who knows or wants to know Latin names for each flower. The flowers are grouped into families and each flower is given a number which corresponds to a photo in the second half of the book, so a person must try to use both parts of the book at the same time, an arrangement I've always found cumbersome. This is a serious guide, for serious students of wildflowers.