Books: The Tree Guide You Want

I spent an entire year once learning trees and shrubs ... three-hour classes most every Saturday morning at local arboretums and parks, studying the plants up close, learning which species have alternate or opposite branching, which have compound or single leaves, which ones flower at what time of year, and learning all of the botanical names (and how to spell them).

Some of the trees are hard to tell apart, and I've yet to find the perfect tree ID book, but the new Sibley Guide to Trees (Alfred a. Knopf, 2009), comes mighty close.  It's written and illustrated by David Allen Sibley of the Sibley Guide to Birds, and it's a masterful contribution to the genre.

The guide covers 668 native and/or commonly found trees throughout the US and Canada, and it includes descriptions of all native trees except for the 100-plus that are only found in southern Florida.

After he takes you through the basic botany of trees, Sibley divides the book by taxonomic families, and then classifies the trees by genus and species.  That is, the Rose Family (Rosaceae), includes not only cherries, but also plums, apricots, almonds, peaches, hawthorns, apples, pears, mountain ashes, serviceberries and more.  While some people might find plant families confusing, once you get used to them, it's actually a most sensible way to help identify particular plants.  And there are a couple of great indexes in the back of the book, so if you're just looking for oaks, you can find them very easily.

With each entry, there's a short written description of the tree and its main characteristics, along with drawings of the leaves, buds, bark, flowers, fruits and seeds -- and in many cases, the tree structure or form.  And wow, when you flip through the pine section, you can easily see the difference in the needles and cones. Best of all, Sibley includes a map with each entry showing the natural range of the tree throughout the US and Canada.  The range of native American species is identified on the maps in bright green, while non-native trees that are now growing in the wild are identified in yellow.

You won't find every tree that's available in nurseries (like the Chinese fringe tree or the hornbeam maple or the fragrant epaulette tree), but that's not the point of this book. 

What I liked best about it is that it's small enough to take with you outside when you want to know whether you're looking at a white, a black, or a red oak.  My copy is likely going to to reside in the car, and I bet it'll be completely dog-eared within a year or two.  And as Sibley says in the introduction, even when you've spent years studying trees, "some small change in appearance one day might draw your attention to a tree you've never noticed before .... It is possible to see trees that were alive when Columbus landed in the New World, and even some that were already old in the time of Julius Caesar."  Now that's a thrilling thing to think about.

(click on link to purchase book)

Comments

[Deborah at Kilbourne Grove]

Now that sounds like a book that I should have. I recently bought a new house and there are a few ash trees in the backyard. It is now just a matter of figuring out what variety. This book should help!