Survey: Wildflower field guides
Do you own a field guide? What do you think of it?
This survey is being conducted partly to determine whether a new field guide specifically for Minnesota wildflowers is worth publishing. I think it is, how about you?
Tags: books
June 9th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I only use books that have pictures of the flowers instead of drawings. I find that you can’t really tell the flower very well from a drawing because something specific is always left out. With a picture, you can really tell what you are looking at. Sometimes the leaves of the plant are not in the picture or not in focus. It would be very helpful to not only have the flower, but also the leaves and stem for identification. I really enjoy Stan Tekiela books a lot. They are however not complete so I have to use a large number of books to find everything.
I would really enjoy having another Minnesota Wildflower book!
June 10th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Books organized by flower color are not so good out in the field. I usually have to thumb through whole sections to find anything, only to discover that what looks like a purple flower to me is in the pink section. It gets a little frustrating sometimes.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
“Wildflowers of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region” by Merel R. Black and Emmet J. Judziewicz is great for eastern Minnesota as it has almost every species in it. The photos are small, but the comprehensiveness of it makes up for that. I’ve seen nothing comparable to it that I’d want to carry around out in the field.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
there needs to be better and more photos. There needs to be a more plants in the field guides. The more specific detail the better. There is DEFINITELY room for a better field guide.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I find no single guide is complete in its coverage of the wildflowers of our area. For pure prairie the Ladd and Oberle book is good. But Newcomb and Peterson both cover more kinds of wildflower.
July 10th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Remember that photos are only as good as the photographer, lighting, and printing accuracy in coloration…drawings can offer much greater detail including important ID characters
July 11th, 2009 at 6:24 am
I try to carry “Wildflowers of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region with me at all times!” If I were more hardy, I’d also be carrying Welby Smith’s “Trees and Shrubs of MN”. That would be a good guide for your new book. He does an elegant job of simplifying the keys, distilling out the most salient ID and ecological role in ecosystem features for each plant – all on 2 pages. Good luck with your project.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
I also use Wildflowers of the Northern Great Planes by FR Vance JR Jowsey and JS McLean and I like the book What’s Doin’ the Bloomin? by Clayton and Michele Oslund