Review by Choice Review
Clemants and Gracie offer a colorful, portable book with photographs that will help amateur/professional naturalists identify about 1,450 northeastern wildflowers. It avoids grasses and grasslike plants but includes some shrubs. Descriptions and photos are organized for identification by dividing the plants into groups by flower color, then leaf type, and finally flower petal number. Thus users may home in on a relatively small number of pages for quick identification of unknowns. The book is artfully designed with text and range maps on the left pages and color plates on the right. The range maps, particularly welcome, permit a quick scan to discover whether the plant is present in the user's location. The descriptions are concise but avoid botanical jargon. The flower photographs are often supplemented with very small overlaid photos of either a leaf or a flower close-up; each includes a bar representing the flower's actual size. The obvious comparisons are to the Peterson guide and to Newcomb's Wildflower Guide (1977), which is illustrated with line drawings and significantly less expensive. This book is probably a better choice for beginners, thanks to its appealing photos and simple organization. Professionals will want it primarily for the range maps and more current nomenclature. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and professionals. G. D. Dreyer Connecticut College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
