Wild Orchids of North America, North of Mexico

Rating:
Summary: Orchids of North America
Review: I have been awaiting the publication of this book for several months after I discovered it was forthcoming. If you are looking for a checklist of wild orchids with sharp color pictures then this is for you. For myself it lacked detailed information of the various orchids. This is likely not possible or the book would be too large to easily carry with you into the field. My suggestion is find an orchid book for your region that can concentrate on the local varieties. In my area of the Midwest, I would suggest "Orchids of the Western Great Lakes Region" by Frederick W. Case, Jr. That book is an older book but contains some very useful information.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I have been awaiting the publication of this book for several months after I discovered it was forthcoming. If you are looking for a checklist of wild orchids with sharp color pictures then this is for you. For myself it lacked detailed information of the various orchids. This is likely not possible or the book would be too large to easily carry with you into the field. My suggestion is find an orchid book for your region that can concentrate on the local varieties. In my area of the Midwest, I would suggest "Orchids of the Western Great Lakes Region" by Frederick W. Case, Jr. That book is an older book but contains some very useful information.

Rating:
Summary: Filled from cover to cover with full-color photographs
Review: Informatively written by Paul Martin Brown (Research Associate, University of Florida Herbarium, Florida Museum of Natural History), The Wild Orchids Of North America, North Of Mexico is a comprehensive field guide filled from cover to cover with full-color photographs. Each photograph of a different wild orchid species is accompanied by a simple line drawing by botanic illustrator Stan Folsom which brings out the appearance of the plant and enhances the basic species information. A beautiful checklist resource for flower and nature lovers, and a seminal addition to any dedicated horticultural and/or gardening reference collection, The Wild Orchids Of North America, North Of Mexico is also available in a hardcover edition (0813025710).

Rating:
Summary: Good coffee table book for Orchid lovers
Review: My summary:
Easy to page though in an hour or two. There is a real photo of each orchid listed in this book. I am not a botanist or a taxonomist -- I don't want a textbook or 900 page field guide.

This is mainly a picture book to give you a name for an orchid you find out by a trail or in your back yard.

It has cross-reference listings of common and botanical names -- helpful for google searching or if you think it might be one of a few orchids listed.

The photos are good, but the drawings in this manual lack the detail to know what the plant is really supposed to look like. You really cannot tell leaf shape, plant shape, size, etc from the drawings.

Rating:
Summary: Good coffee table book for Orchid lovers
Review: My summary:
Easy to page though in an hour or two. There is a real photo of each orchid listed in this book. I am not a botanist or a taxonomist -- I don't want a textbook or 900 page field guide.

This is mainly a picture book to give you a name for an orchid you find out by a trail or in your back yard.

It has cross-reference listings of common and botanical names -- helpful for google searching or if you think it might be one of a few orchids listed.

The photos are good, but the drawings in this manual lack the detail to know what the plant is really supposed to look like. You really cannot tell leaf shape, plant shape, size, etc from the drawings.

Rating:
Summary: Orchids of North America
Review: The book serves as good checklist for the North American species. It should not be construed as anything more than that. The photos are subpar.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment, unfortunately.
Review: When a new field guide appears that is focused on a special group of plants, one anticipates that a lot of information will be presented about the subject of interest. Well-written field guides should contain at least a short paragraph discussing the details of the life histories, morphology, ranges, etc., of the creatures contained within. Range maps and proper illustrations are appropriate as well. This book does a minimal job of all of this. Although the photographs are nice, they are too small to glean all of the necessary details and some look altered by computer effects or printer error. Furthermore, the pen-and-ink drawings are awful, if at least in the sense of being useful for identifying the plants. The information provided in the text with each species is surprisingly limited, not revealing enough on the form, biology and geographic range of these plants. This lack of necessary detail can actually be misleading to the reader in their undrestanding of the species. This lack of detail also makes the book far less interesting than it could have been otherwise. The large taxonomic key in the back of the book is useful, but keys can not provide the user with a good mental image of the physical form of the plants, rather only of a very limited number of features, in contrast to what a proper textual description can provide. Furthermore, this book skips on some other necessary details, such as an incomplete bibliography, not listing all the references cited in the text, for example. The original sources for a book are important avenues for readers to learn more, therefore they should all be properly listed. The point of a field guide is to educate; if enthusiastic readers are unable to find necessary information due to the general lack of attention to detail in many, let alone most aspects of a guide, then that can not leave them confident that they have learned much of anything new, let alone be confident that they can identify the species properly.

I had high hopes for this book when I first heard of its printing, but unfortunately I find it to be one of the more disappointing field guides I have seen, for orchids or any subject. It is not a adequate substitute for old, classic orchid guides, such as Donovan Correll's book of similar title (Native Orchids of North America North of Mexico) and Carlyle Luer's book on the same topic (The native orchids of the United States and Canada, excluding Florida), or even books of half of that amount of content. Sadly, these two classic books are out of print and rare. Probably the best approach for the curious native orchidist is to purchase a set of state and regional orchid field guides that are loaded with interesting information, such as those by Case (western Great Lakes), Coleman (Arizona and the SW), Homoya (Indiana), Liggio (Texas), Smith (Minnesota) and others. The substance revealed about the lives of the orchids within these books is more than enough to allow the reader of several of these to put together the pieces of the wonderful puzzle of these very interesting plants. It would be quite useful to have a new book that integrates such information at the necessary and appropriate level for all of the North American orchid species, but "Wild Orchids of North America, North of Mexico" by Brown & Folsom is definitely not that book, although I had hoped that it would be. I am very disappointed and feel that it is not a worthwhile purchase.