Thomas Hemmerly

paper

344 pages

6 x 9

full-color photographs & maps


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 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 context for the information on individual plant species that will be valuable to both professional scientists and amateurs. The 378 full-color plates, grouped by color for clear reference, appear alongside plant descriptions for ease of identification.

Each entry includes a description of the plant’s habitat, abundance, and geological distribution, along with information about its ethnobotanical, economic, or medicinal uses. An appendix lists and describes the best places in the Appalachians for finding wildflowers. Diagrams of leaf and flower shapes are a further aid to plant identification.

“Thomas E. 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 F. Johnson, author of Bogs of New England and The Nature of Vermont

“Appalachian Wildflowers forces readers to consider wildflowers as parts of interacting communities or ecosystems . . . 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