Nancy C. Olmstead

This guide covers the most common wildflowers and weeds of the Eastern Region of North America. Entries are grouped by color and shape to aid in identification, with over 700 full-color pictures. The caption under each photo provides common name, dimensions, and page reference. The page numbers take you to more detailed descriptions grouped by family and species. Helpfully, these entries are cross-referenced back to the page of each picture.

Under the detailed entry, you learn the family of the wildflower or weed, description, flowering period, habitat, range, and comments. In spite of having both a small picture and a small description, I still couldn’t differentiate among many of the entries, and was occasionally perplexed. For example, there is an entry for poison ivy, but not poison oak. There is an entry for poison sumac, but it does not appear in the index. Many of the flowers look too much like one another for a novice like me to be able to make a successful identification, and in spite of the large number of items included, there is always a chance the one you want will be missing.

Nevertheless, it is still better than no guide at all, and the size of the guide is convenient for carrying around in your backpack while out and about.… (mehr)

These were the field guides I learned from as a wee one. They have a front section of beautiful color photographs, arranged by color and shape, which cross-references to a textual section in the back, which is organized taxonomically. I have to confess that my affection for these is mostly nostalgic; I have rarely had luck using the plates to identify plants, because they often don't show growth habit or foliage very well, and sometimes don't even provide very good context for size. Sometimes two plants on the same page with very similar flowers will have been photographed in completely different ways, which makes it difficult to compare. They also lean toward the showier and larger plants, and leave out a lot of weedy, roadside/lawn species. They are very pretty, though, and the descriptive sections at the back are actually quite good. It's possible that I'm biased because all the common plants that can be identified out of here are ones I'd already learned by heart while I was stil pre-literate!… (mehr)