Botanical Book Shopping

Doing whirlwind expeditions like our Sierra birding jaunt this past weekend always makes me yearn to pick up yet another field guide. I don’t get up to the Sierra often enough to remember all the dominant plants I learned in my class on the California flora a dozen or so years ago, so this afternoon I picked up a copy of John Stuart and John Sawyer’s Trees and Shrubs of California, which is a field guide to all of the trees and many of the important shrubs. It came out three years ago, and would have been great for my class.

I have so far resisted buying a copy of the Jepson Manual, the current standard flora for California. It is a huge book (1400 pages), not easy to carry in the field, and we don’t have room for it on our bookshelves. My coworkers have always had a copy handy as well. It was published in 1993, and a project to revise it is underway, So I’m kind of holding out for the release of the second edition, due out in 2008 (at which point botanists get to relearn many, many names). But just for fun this evening I checked out a copy of Jepson from our public library.

Looking now at the web pages for the UC Press California Natural History Guide series, I am delighted to see that they are about to issue a revised version of Storer and Usinger’s Sierra Nevada Natural History. This is a classic field guide describing over 750 species ranging from fungi to mammals living in the Sierras. It was published in 1963, so it is quite dated (birder trivia question: ever heard of a Tolmie warbler?), and just yesterday I was hoping somebody would step up to the task of revising it.