A Field Guide to Common South Texas Shrubs

Rating:
Summary: Why This Book Is Great
Review: I use this book with 7th and 8th grade students when doing field ecology studies. The reason I really like it is because it not only provides a closeup photograph of the leaves, wood and seeds but ALSO provides a photograph of the entire plant, as it looks to a student walking up to it. Additionally it gives data on the nutritional value to wildlife and livestock as well as native uses. Botany is a personal weakness, but I find the book easy to use. A field guide for botany bozos. Experts may like it too, but I cannot speak to that. (We use it to identify vegetation in West Texas too.)

Rating:
Summary: Why This Book Is Great
Review: I use this book with 7th and 8th grade students when doing field ecology studies. The reason I really like it is because it not only provides a closeup photograph of the leaves, wood and seeds but ALSO provides a photograph of the entire plant, as it looks to a student walking up to it. Additionally it gives data on the nutritional value to wildlife and livestock as well as native uses. Botany is a personal weakness, but I find the book easy to use. A field guide for botany bozos. Experts may like it too, but I cannot speak to that. (We use it to identify vegetation in West Texas too.)

Rating:
Summary: Nice
Review: This book(let) has much to commend it. It is excellently printed on glossy paper. Picture quality generally is excellent. The text is neatly organized, with botanical names properly written (even synonyms provided where necessary, in footnotes).

Still, it feels like something is missing. Maybe it is that I would expect a book(let) that focuses on 44 species to offer extensive pictorial coverage. Ususally a book will have many species with few pictures each or few species with many pictures each (or at least full-sized ones). Maybe it is the fact that although the title promises "shrubs" the plants covered are all over the place (including two Cacti, one Yucca, many trees and even a "perennial shrub" on p84).

There does appear to be nothing really wrong here (disregarding the allegation that Ephedra has "fruit") and it is a really nice book(let), but still somewhat unsatisfying.