Customer Reviews

Wildflowers of Vermont

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4 star:		(2)
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I bought this book last week and it's about my 10th guide to wildflowers. It's a really spendid guide in three respects at least. First the photographs are wonderful. Ms. Carter is a first-class photographer. Second, the guide fits in your pocket, something no other guides do. Third, it doesn't bog you down in lots of details that are not important in the field. Once you have identified a plant, you can enter the name, or Latin name into a Web search engine such as Google and find out more than any guide could possible cover anyway. It has lots of little embellishments that show the author is also a good publisher (this isn't from an international conglomerate, but from her own publishing company). Flowers are organized by color, and flower size is emphasized so you don't think that 2-inch color blossom in the book is different from the 1/4-inch flower in the field. It's a great little guide and is useful throughout the NorthEast because we share the same wildflowers.

Great little book. Very informative and easy to use. A must have field guide for anyone who likes to identify flowers and weeds.

Kate Carter's little book is a wonderful invitation to visit the countryside and see firsthand the old time beauty that a place like Vermont has to offer. A profusion of the most interesting looking flowers will greet the hiker or traveler in almost any corner of Vermont. Make sure you are ready with this little book in hand.

These are exquisite photographs--most of them taken by Carter herself. The division by color makes it easy to identify the flower you find and a joy to look through this book in the evening after a day on the hiking trail. There's also a neat guide to botanical terms (amaze your friends by knowing what a clasping leaf is or by describing the sepal of your favorite flower) as well as an alphabetical list of flower families with their characteristics.

The very first time I went into the woods with this guide in Stowe, I found a bottle gentian along the trail. Be warned: not all wild flowers are beautiful, for example the common burdock, whose flowers become brown burrs that cling to the clothing, and touch-me-nots and chicory can be profuse, unsightly and weedy along the roadways.

How interesting that several of the flowers that appear in Carter's book (including the gentian) can be found in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Of course, that's because she loved the flowers so much, and because her native Amherst is not far from Vermont's border with Massachusetts.

The flowers are waiting. Get this book and get out there.

Wildflowers of Vermont makes identifying local flowers easy through color categories, brief descriptions, and notes of when and where the featured flower in the photograph was found.

It is a great tool to carry with Newcomb's Guide to Wildflowers. Some of the images in Wildflowers of Vermont can be mistaken for similar plants because the leaves are not always clear in the photographs. On the same note, Newcomb's can be overly detailed and difficult to navigate if one is not familiar with all of the plant terms. With both, identification is made much easier.

The one problem I have found with my copy of Wildflowers of Vermont, as well as several friends' copies, is that after one season of use, the pages fall out. I now carry mine in a ziplock bag and reorganize the forty pages or so that are tucked in because they can no longer be flipped through. I would highly recommend the book. Just use it with a very gentle hand.

This is an excellent field guide for wildflowers in Vermont. It is extremely easy to use for beginners, since it is arranged first by the colors of the blossoms. You can open the book to the right section immediately, since the colors are printed on the page margins. Then you leaf through the beautiful high-quality color photos to find the flower that you're looking at. To aid in identification, the height of the plant and the flower dimensions are also provided in the margins. For each flower, there is a brief and informative description, an indication of the blooming season, and the habitat. By using this book, I have finally been able to put names on the flowers that I see everyday in my backyard or on hikes. If you live in Vermont (or even in nearby states), I would highly recommend this book.