Appalachian Wildflowers - by Thomas E Hemmerly (Paperback)

About the Book

With 378 color plates, this field guide covers the wildflowers of the entire Appalachian region, which stretches from Quebec to northern Alabama. Readers will learn to identify this region's wildflowers by shape, color, family, and habitat. Each entry includes a description of the plant's habitat, abundance, and geographical distribution.

Book Synopsis

This informative field guide covers the wildflowers of the entire Appalachian region, which stretches from Quebec to northern Alabama, encompassing the Catskills of New York, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and many mountain ranges in between. Using this book, readers will learn to identify this region's wildflowers by shape, color, family, and habitat.

Ecologist and botanist Thomas E. Hemmerly encourages us to "read the landscape" in order to learn about plants' habitats, distribution, and use. In his brief, introductory chapters, he describes ecosystems such as mountain forests and wetlands to provide a context for the information on individual plant species that will be valuable to both professional scientists and amateur naturalists.

Practical: The 378 color plates, grouped by color for clear reference, appear alongside plant descriptions for ease of identification.Informative: Each entry includes a description of the plant's habitat, abundance, and geographical distribution, along with information about its ethnobotanical, economic, or medicinal uses. An appendix lists and describes the best places in the Appalachians for "botanizing."User-Friendly: Diagrams of leaf and flower shapes are a further aide to plant identification.The Appalachian Region: Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Quebec, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia

Review Quotes

Hemmerly speaks with authority, accuracy, and conviction in his writing. His knowledge and love of wildflowers, and indeed more generally of the Appalachians and natural world, come through clearly.

--Charles W. Johnson "author of The Nature of Vermont and Bogs of the Northeast"

I like the idea of encouraging wildflower enthusiasts to consider the objects of their curiosity as something more than postage stamps to be identified and filed away and viewed in isolation. The approach in Appalachian Wildflowers forces readers to consider wildflowers as parts of interacting communities or ecosystems. This brings home more strongly the conservation imperative. The message that individual plants, as well as assemblages, need to be conserved for many reasons, including their known and potential benefits to humans, comes across very strongly in this book.

--Robert Wyatt "editor of Ecology and Evolution of Plant Reproduction"

This book concisely describes and illustrates with excellent color photographs more than 300 of these wildflower species. . . . The book is helpful to naturalists, botanists, and wildflower enthusiasts

--International Hawkwatcher

This is an excellent guide for the vast majority of wildflowers one would encounter while botanizing in the rich Appalachian region.

--Wildlife Activist

About the Author

Thomas E. Hemmerly, author of "Wildflowers of the Central South," is a professor of biology at Middle Tennessee State University.