2 comments about Plants for Natural Gardens: Southwestern Native & Adaptive Trees, Shrubs, Wildflowers & Grasses.

1. Judith Phillips books are a godsend to those of us who garden in the high desert. She understands our highly varied zones and which plants thrive in each area. The illustrations and codes are very helpful. I am a public librarian and have bought many copies of her three books for our library and to use at home. Rather than hitting your head against the wall and wasting precious water trying to make something grow that does not belong in your area, Judith helps you create a great garden that will thrive and be relatively low maintenance. Her suggestions on plant combinations are particularly useful. The only criticism I have is one that happened at the printers: the pages in the back of Plants for Native Gardens which lists a chart of adaptive plants are not numbered. I highly recommend all three of Phillips' fine books.



2. Living in Las Vegas, my water concious conversion from grass
   to drought tolerant plants and landscape had to be well
   thought out. It also had to be an efficient, long lasting,
   and effective action.
   This book helped in all of those areas.

2 comments about Taylor's Guide to Ornamental Grasses: More Than 165 of These Versatile, Low-Maintenance Plants, Pictured in Color with Full Descriptions of How to Use Them (Taylor's Guides).

1. This is an excellent presentation of everything one might care to know about ornamental grasses. But the first copy I received had a LOT of blank pages where text and illustrations should have been. Of course Amazon replaced the defective copy with no additional cost to me. Check your copy carefully upon receipt.



2. It comes in hundreds of colors, varieties and useful blendings in a modern and private garden. This book gives wonderfull pictures and ideas on the proper decoramental grasses for your garden. Love this book as a preplanner and usefule guide for what will lwork.

2 comments about Common Texas Grasses: An Illustrated Guide (W. L. Moody, Jr., Natural History).

1. THIS BOOK ON GRASS IS A REAL GOOD BOOK FOR PEOPLE INTERESTED IN LEARNING A LOT OVER IDENTIFICATION OF GRASSES.



2. This book has excellent detailed drawings of the whole plant, and the bloom or seed head. The descriptions of the grasses are thorough and include fair-excellent ratings on wildlife and or cattle grazing. For a native grass enthousiast or a rancher, this book is excellent.
   
   Many grasses have similar visual attributes, though. For the average person who has no previous knowledge of grasses and no alternate source with actual photos, this resource could be confusing by itself.

5 comments about Agnes Chase's First Book of Grasses.

1. Agnes Chase loved botany as a hobby and she wrote this book in that vein. There are lots of excellent illustrations of plant parts that are clear and easy to understand - a must for grass identification. This edition has an excellent preface, going into the history of Chase's life. It's a must buy for the hobbiest and the professional alike.



2. Highly recommended for "wannabe" botanists and plant lovers, this book divides the complexity of grasses into twelve relatively simple lessons. It is perfect for quickly gaining a basic understanding of the taxonomy of grasses, and, of course, impressing your friends at parties with lines like "hey check out the florets on this pedicellate spikelet." (Lesson 3)

   This book is a primer not a field guide, check out Knobel/Faust for a good companion volume.




3. Although my botanical interests lie mainly in mycology and dendrology, I was truly delighted to find this little book. It is simply the best way to get a conceptual understanding of the structure of grasses and the main genera in a way that will definitely aid your ability to identify them in the field using more traditional taxonomic keys. Normally, such keys lead you from the specific characters to the taxon/concept itself, but with this book, you learn the more powerful concepts that unify and differentiate the various genera. This was a tremendous aid to me in my field identification of this important group, because after reading this book several times, I basically knew what was going on, instead of just "cookbooking" it using the typical botanical key.

   I have sort of an amusing story associated with this book. By the time I had memorized this book I could basically identify any grass at least to the genus level by sight, and then I could consult a more detailed taxonomic key from there for the species. I was once sitting around a fire with my fellow mycologists, who were somewhat amused I had somehow learned how to identify the grasses, which, even for a botanist, are an esoteric group. So when they asked what I was doing, I said that once you understood the grasses, even an apparently desolate, boring, sand lot down the block can provide hours of fun. Mycologists are used to spending hours tramping through the woods in search of interesting mushrooms, so they found this quite funny and everybody laughed at the thought.

   Anway, Agnes Chase loved the grasses and this book is filled with that enthusiasm in this clear and concise book, helping to make one of the most difficult areas of plant identification easier to deal with.




4. As a first-year botany student, I was overwhelmed by the confusing tables and cryptic systems when trying to identify certain plants. I am so relieved to find a guide like Agnes Chase's First Book of Grasses, where identification methods are made simple, yet remain as factual and dependable as the volumes on horticulture and botany for advanced students. The book is a classic in the world of botany, however the updated fourth edition makes it all the more useful in relation to the ever-changing world of scientific knowledge. This guide is a must-have for any beginner in botany as it opens the doors to the world of agrostology in such a clear and dependable manner.



5. This one is definitely not for beginners. It is far too detailed in terms of minute structure of the grasses and is not organized in such a way as to help the amateur in the identification of a particular grass type.

5 comments about The Color Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses: Sedges, Rushes, Restios, Cat-Tails and Selected Bamboos.

1. Excellent and complete information about ornamental grasses. A great book.

   Thirty pages on the botany, anatomy, and classification of grasses. Twenty pages on native habitat, thirty pages on designing with grasses, and twenty pages of growing and propagating grasses. 170 page encyclopedia listing 400+ species / varieties of grasses. Each species is described in a paragraph or two of text along side a clear photograph of the plant. In the back of the book, you find a 2 page glossary, 5 page bibliography, 2 page grass nursery listing, USDA and European hardiness maps, and a complete index of all grasses by common name. Very complete book.

   As a bonus, the book is also filled with awesome photography.

   If you garden with ornamental grasses, this book is a must buy. Excellent information, well worth the money!




2. This book is structured, written, photographed and edited with parallel purpose and effect: communication of the author's respect and regard for the book's subject and for its readers. Mr. Darke sets out to inform and does so with enconomy but in full course; when he instructs, he teaches the novice and gives pause to the critic; when he photographs he shows his passion and inspires with the nature and wonder of his subjects. The book is encyclopedic, yet its prose is always to the point with the agreeable dryness of a good, well-bodied wine. Credible, trustworthy, enlightening. This is the best gardening book I have ever read. Negatives? Only one: Mr. Darke's standards are unimpeachable; those of the book's typographer and designer, however, are not.



3. This is such a wonderful informational book... AND ... a gorgeous coffee table book. It is terrific from beginning to end! If you like or are interested in, or even thinking about Ornamental Grasses ... then THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU! I can't imagine anyone who has an interest in Ornamental Grasses NOT LOVING THIS BOOK, and would be delighted they purchased it. My only concern is that it is going to look dog-earred from my reading it over and over and over again ... which frankly takes away from its beauty on our coffee table.



4. Rick Darke's book is typical of his work. It is extremely well written, a detailed, very thorough guide to ornamental grasses, full of helpful pictures as well as information on growing and maintaining grasses. This book should be a classic for decades to come.



5. I think you must buy this excellent book about grasses with a lot of good photos.

3 comments about Grasses: Versatile Partners for Uncommon Garden Design.

1. Grasses by freelance gardening writer Nancy J. Ondra is a beautiful and practical guide to raising ornamental grasses in one's garden. Filled cover to cover with excellent color photographs by life-long gardener and gardening photographer Saxon Holt of aesthetic and splendid grasses, the profusely illustrated text presents the reader with a wide choice of colored grasses to best accentuate the beauty of one's garden and how to best select choice plants for wet, dry, hot, or shady sites. Highly recommended for personal and professional gardening, horticultural and landscaping reference collections, even non-gardeners will appreciate the dazzling, coffee-table book quality photography of this singularly elegant yet practical guide.



2. Grasses. They add so much wonderful texture to perennial collections and the landscape. They add terrific movement, catching the smallest breezes, defying the strongest winds and I wanted them in my garden however I knew so little about them. Then along came this terrific book by Nancy J. Ondra with photographs by Saxon Holt. Everything about this book is appealing.
   I appreciate the way it is laid out in four sections; Getting to Know Grasses, Color Palettes, Seasonal Usage and Selecting for Location. Ms. Ondra is a font of information without overloading your brain and as a Grasses Novice I find that useful. The photography by Mr. Holt is truly beautiful, with most of the photographs taken in combinations with other plant materials so you can get the feel of the various Grasses in the landscape. Section Four (p.94) really helps you get down to the nitty-gritty of making the appropriate selections for various soils and exposures. This is the sort of book to use year in and year out and I think would be useful to professional and advanced gardners as well as beginners. You get a lot of bang for your buck with this volume. Highly recommended!



3. Love this book, wonderful pictures, but --- I find myself looking for a comprehensive chart / list that gives an overview -- so that you can make gardening choices easier ... examples; height, color, cool/warm, best conditions, clump or creep, zones --- well you get the point . . .

1 comments about Landscaping With Ornamental Grasses Sunset book.

1. "By incorporating ornamental grasses into your garden, you are doing more than choosing just another plant out of many available. You are inviting nature into your landscape. With their naturalistic simplicity, grasses are the perfect plants for a new gardening sensibility, one that works in harmony with the earth rather than strangling against it..." Fiona Gilsenan writes. She continues to discuss other aspects of the grasses: origin of the species and the "real" grasses. She also covers design techniques for grasses, the use of grasses in different type of gardens and locations, how to care for grasses, shopping for grasses, and troubleshooting.
   
   "Landscaping With Ornamental Grasses Sunset book" includes six chapters: the Nature of Grasses, the Lowdown, Standing Tall, For Every Garden, In and Out of Garden, and Grasses and Grasslike Plants.
   
   "Landscaping With Ornamental Grasses Sunset book" has 128 pages and over 250 beautiful interior photos. It is a very unique book for innovative landscape design!

5 comments about How To Identify Grasses: And Grasslike Plants.

1. Not especially useful for beginner grass identification because concentrates on structural detail rather than overall appearance of growth. However, I recommend it for its excellent illustrated glossary.



2. This book is practical and systematic. The topic is difficult, at best, and the author gives all the tools and understanding needed to build up your skills. As a consultant that works with native plant materials, I have found this book to be a useful field reference in separating out invasive species.



3. I finally bought a copy of this book for myself after having to borrow it from my plant friends and professors. They would not permit it out of their sight! Anyway it is a very good start to getting accustomed to grasses. They can be quite challenging to identify but this book is very helpful. It is pretty basic, to the point and recommended. It may be a bit challenging for a newbie, but really there is no easy way to learn plant terminology. This one is a good ice breaker!



4. There are a lot of plants that become colorful on the earth.
   The plant that occupies the majority of Holocene place is a grasses and grasslike plants.
   However, if it is not a specialist, the grasses and grasslike plant are not distinguished easily.
   I am a farmer. The grasses and grasslikes were an annoying weed in me.
   This book is a book that gave me new feeling to the grasses and grasslikes. It is not an interpretation weed in me any further any longer. I give my thanks to Doctor Harrington.
   
   This book is as splendid as "Peterson first guides".
   I call this book and "How to identify plants" "HARRINGTON MANUALS" !



5. With this book, you will know all about how to identify a grass, and not be able to identify a single one. It reminds me of the new husband who sits on the edge of the bed and tells his new wife how wonderful it is going to be, but never gets around to it.
   I returned the book.

5 comments about Field Guide to the Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes of the Northern United States.

1. great drawings depicting mst abundant species although they just go to descriptions for the more rare species.
   
   good price, good on grasses less on sedges and rushs.



2. Decent book, the sketches are very helpful for attempting to key out species.



3. I am a professional ecologist and spend at least 100 days a year in the field characterizing vegetation communities and plant species. It is difficult to tell which part of the country this book would be best suited for, as it would be considered incomplete in the areas I have used it in (Northern and Southern Rockies, Black Hills, Intermountain West and Northern Great Plains). I found it's treatment of rushes especially wanting. This book has made it to the field with me only a few times and was seldom used then. The most redeeming quality of this book is it's size, which can easily fit into a back pocket, but when it's taken out you will probably not be able to key the more difficult and uncommon graminiods found in the U.S.



4. This book is suitable for a first introduction to the grasses and their relatives, but nothing more. The other reviewers here are correct when they say that the book is of limited use for serious work, but then I have those books too, and they're about 900 pages long and weigh many pounds, and don't travel well. The treatment of carex or the sedges is limited as people have said, but carex has many species and a small book like this just isn't going to cut it, but as I said, professional level graminology books are going to weigh even more than your usual taxonomic book because just the grass family itself has about 14,000 species.
   
   The illustrations are well done, though, and there is some knowledge to be gleaned from the book. But use it as a stepping stone to other more advanced works on the grasses. The four volume work by the Smithsonian on the grasses of America is one of the big, weighty one that I was referring to, and that's worth acquiring if you're serious. These are large format volumes and very heavy, so the problem there is that they don't travel well.
   
   For helping you learn about the grasses, I would recommend you buy Agnes Chases's wonderful little book, A First Book of Grasses, to learn about them first. She takes a conceptual, top-down approach, teaching you the basic concepts of grass structure on which the keys are ultimately based, and after that, you can start using the keys with much more confidence. For example, starting from the premise that the grass spikelet is a reduced, leafy, flowering branch, she leads you from the most basic spikelets, such as those in Festuca, to the most modified or complex ones that show the greatest deviation from the basic spikelet plan. After reading her book through several times, I found I could identify many grasses to the genus level just by eyeballing them, and then I could drill down to the species from there.
   
   The bottom line is that becoming a good field graminologist is just something that takes special study and effort. I learned to be able to key out just about anything in the group in about a month of intensive study of the books, plus several hours a day working in the field. And by "the field," I mean the sand lots near my house, and several local parks, and people's front yards. The nice thing about the grasses is that even an apparently dull, boring sand lot devoid of pretty flowers or trees can provide you with hours of fun trying to identify the grasses. It can be learned but it's something you'll probably need to allot some separate time to from the rest of your work and/or studies, but you can get a significant leg up on the topic just working around your own neighborhood.



5. The book is perhaps of historical interest and contains some adequate illustrations that may help you recoginize some genera. It is, however, fairly useless for identification to the species level.

5 comments about Grasses: An Identification Guide (Sponsored by the Roger Tory Peterson Institute).

1. As another review noted the range of this book is limited, from Minnesota to Kentucky and Maryland south, and north to Maine, although some of the grasses are more widespread. The copyright date is 1979 and while that does not disqualify it, it has not been updated. It suffers from 1) poor reproduction of the line drawings which are supposedly "as beautiful as they are exact" - they aren't either in this edition, being too small and with line details running together to show nothing but a black blob in many cases, and 2) no photographs, which I have come to expect of any decent field guide nowadays (especially in the absence of GOOD line drawings!). Also, the grasses are organized "by visual similarity, not always by taxonomic grouping." I'd prefer the latter.

   On the plus side it has a useable key and often interesting information is presented for a species. I'll keep this book, but I would have bought something else had I known!




2. As a working environmental biologist I must frequently record vast lists of species I encounter in the field. While eductaed in most plants and animals I have always put the grasses into a mental compartment of "troublesome" plants. This book provides clear and immensely helpful idenitifcation guides to a group of plants that are both common and difficult, for even the experienced, to distinguish. I now carry it as a part of my regular set of references for both the field and in-house identification. Grasses are such an important group of plants that many of us find confusing and difficult to identify. This book has made the individual species of grasses more accesible for all who use it. Any ecologist or budding amateur will benefit from the easy reading and pertinent information in this book. A further understanding of ecology and food resources for specific taxa is now more easily obtainable. I have waited for a book like this for a long time.



3. 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.



4. 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.



5. I am dissapointed that it did not tell me the region that this book covered before I purchased it.