I'm no expert at botany, but I've spent my share of time using Peterson and Audubon guides. This guide differs from them in two important ways: 1) The descriptions and pictures are side by side--no paging back and forth! 2) This covers a much higher proportion of species.



This guide does lack info on the ecology of the plants. It has one purpose--to help you look at a plant and figure out what it is. For the breadth of species it covers, it accomplishes this purpose extremely well, very efficiently, and in a format that is easy to carry.



There are two notable features: 1) Both natives and non-natives are included, but the names of non-natives are preceded by a "*". Simple, but very helpful. 2) The range maps are like nothing I've seen before--each species has a small map just to the left of it's description which uses color-coded bands to show when the species is in flower. Most of the maps have just one color, but this is still a useful combination of related information. These small maps are greatly helped by the book's covering only the northeast US, allowing greater detail.



The book's being limited to the NE would of course be a deal breaker for many. The only other possible complaint that I can see someone having is that identification depends heavily on the plant actually having flowers at the time. The key emphasizes flower color and the photographs tend to focus on the flowers and not the whole plant structure. However, I'm not sure what an effective and efficient alternative would be.

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