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Title: Grasses: An Identification Guide (Sponsored by the Roger Tory Peterson Institute)
ISBN: 0395628814
Author:
Publicate Date: 1992-04-30
Publish: 1992-04-30
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.88
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.88
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| Customer Review: |
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1: VERY HANDY NE GRASS FIELD GUIDE
I bought this book when it first came out, and it's still the only basic Northeastern grass ID book available. Though it has some shortcomings and isn't comprehensive, it is an easy-to-use field guide that identifies the most common grasses in this area. It also includes a number of rushes and sedges. The key is simple but effective. The drawings aren't greatly detailed, but usually highlight the main identification features of a grass. Some botanic names may have changed since the guide was published, but this isn't of great importance to the amateur botanist and can easily be handled by the professional (botanic names are always in a state of flux).
When working as a botanist in the field (but without extensive knowledge of grasses), I found this guide very useful for either ID or for narrowing an ID down to a genus. As my ID's needed to be accurate, I'd confirm the ID or make a final ID with more detailed books like Pohl's "How to Know the Grasses" or Fernald's "Gray's Manual of Botany." Yes, I could (and often need to) start with one of these two, but Brown's simpler guide is often a real shortcut. If I can find a grass, or something that strongly resembles it, in her book, it can save a lot of time with the more technical keys.
For someone in the Northeast with an interest in identifying the many fascinating grasses in our area, this is a great book to have on hand.
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2: How did this get published?!
This is a very very poor field guide. The line drawings are totally inadequate and usually only show a small portion of the plant. Habit, for example, is almost never illustrated, while the drawings of the inflorescences are generally not detailed enough to help with identification save for the most distinctive grasses. For that matter, much of the book is devoted to plants that are not grasses, while many common true grasses (millet, sorghum, etc.) are not treated at all. Sedges, rushes, horsetails, and other non-grasses are all mixed in a completely illogical fashion, which is quite likely to do more harm than good to a beginner or novice. The descriptions generally include less than a full sentance of information. As a botanist working for the Smithsonian I cannot recommend this book to naturalists at any level of experience. Grasses are a difficult group to identify, but this book is very unlikely to help in that respect for most grasses that one would encounter. A general field guide like Gleason and Cronquist's "Manual of Vascular Plants of the Northeastern United States" is a much better bet to correctly and effectively ID grasses. Don't buy this book.
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3: Grasses
I am dissapointed that it did not tell me the region that this book covered before I purchased it.
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4: Best Book
I think this book is the best book on grass identification for most of us. You will actually be able to identify most of the grasses you run into. It is not a treatise on grass ecology.
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5: Fantastic Book
I am a former student of Mrs. Brown, from her Botany class at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. This guide is outstanding, and her original illustrations are genuine. As of the time of the original publication, there was absolutely nothing at all to guide students to identify grasses. Other guides copied the concept, but Lauren's is still the pioneer in this field.
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