Newcomb's Wildflower Guide by Lawrence Newcomb
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Book Reviews of Newcomb's Wildflower Guide
Book Review: The definitive guide for amateur botanists!
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading the other reviews, I feel that I should open this review with a caveat: this book is regional, and only covers the northeastern states. With that said, I have been using this guide almost exclusively for 10 years, and if you are serious about learning how to identify a wide variety of wildflowers, you can't go wrong with this book. The black-and-white illustrations are excellent, and while there are some color plates included, I have never felt they were essential to the presentation. If you are more interested in the casual identification of more common flowers, you might indeed prefer a guide that is organized by color. For the serious naturalist, however, flower color should really be the last characteristic you examine. Floral features such as petal shape, structure, and organization, as well as stem and leaf morphology are much more reliable. If you want to be able to quickly identify a variety of flowers in diverse habitats, a guide organized by color is simply impractical. The book makes use of a dichotomous key, whereby you answer simple questions about the structure of the flower to narrow down your final choices. For anyone who's spent ages flipping through the "pink" section of a color-organized guide, this will put an end to your frustration! Using the key does take a little practice, but once you've gotten accustomed to it, it's an indispensable tool. The book also contains flowering vines and shrubs, which are often left out of other guides. I have been recommending this book for many years, and I am just as enthusiastic about it now as I was when I first picked it up. I never go hiking without it!Book Review: Regional but excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
Definitely a regional book. If you travel in N. Georgia up to New England, this is a must-have guide. The black and white line drawings do aid in identifying plants having structure and shape as the defining characteristic because light and shade of color do not come into play as they might in photos. As in birding, the preference for either photos or drawings is an individual one and, until Newcomb's landed in my library, I used photo guides for wildflowers but preferred drawn guides (like Peterson's) for birds. This is the book that changed my mind on that point.
Having said that, this is not a beginner's book. I think I would have had little use for Newcomb's 6 or 7 years ago when I started out with wildflowers. This is the only book whose key system did not leave me reaching for a photo guide out of frustration; the key works very well with this book, and helped make me a more educated plant photographer. Also, since using it, my tolerance for keys and ability to use them have both gone up markedly. I do still carry photo guides with me but, in the region covered, the photo guide is a back-up to Newcomb's and is often used for the additional text as opposed to the pictures.
Book Review: Excellent Wildflower Guide
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, it is for the Northeastern US and Canada, and it covers that area rather well. I live in North Carolina. Most of the plants are here although we have additional species not covered. But I can usually get close enough that I can then go for the extreme detail of Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas. (I have both editions of this Souteastern bible and both editions of the companion Wild Flowers of North Carolina that has color photos).
If I think I know the plant I can look in the index for the botanical or the common name and then go to those descriptions. The key is excellent and easy to use (I don't have to keep going back to the glossary for every other term). If I don't have the plant in front of me I can check variations quickly.
The plant drawings provide detail that photographs usually don't. If you're just looking for color then the other guides should be sufficient, but this guide provides the detail I don't get from the other guides.
Book Review: Newcomb's Wildflower Guide
Summary: 5 Stars
Two types of flower-identification books are available, those that use pure pattern recognition and those that require you to look at the flower. Pattern recognition books usually have pretty pictures of flowers arranged by color and then require you to search many pages to find one that looks like your flower. Newcomb's takes an alternative approach; it requires that you actually look at the flower. The key system is simple to use; for example, how many petals does it have, do the leaves alternate or are they on opposite sides of the stem, is it an herb, bush, or vine, etc. Only after narrowing down the possibilities extensively do you arrive at the pattern recognition stage and have only a few possibilities from which to choose. I have methodically found the names of several different flowers that I could not find even after exhaustive searches of other books. The book is not filled with pretty pictures, it is filled with information and excellent, simple line art.Book Review: Highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are looking to identify wildflowers of the northeast, this is the best pocket field guide out there. It includes more species than other pocket field guides and uses a systematic approach of identification.
It may take a little practice to get a handle on the system, but once you do, you will be identifying wildflowers in lickety-split time. There will be no more leafing through 50+ pages of yellow flowers to find the one you're looking at. This book will walk you through a key that will take you directly to the page your flower is on.
For those of you who like "pretty" photographic field guides, I recommend purchasing one of those as a sidekick to your Newcomb's. When I lead wildflower walks, I carry my Newcomb's with me, but I also carry a National Audubon field guide. This way, if I find a plant that isn't yet in bloom, I can show the participants a photograph of it.