Trees of North America and Europe

Book Description

This splendid guide to tree identification contains more than 1,000 full-color photographs. Each tree is illustrated in full detail -- by leaf, flower, fruit, bark, and mature tree shape -- and is fully described in the text. A unique leaf index makes the identification of trees simple and accurate. The trees are arranged alphabetically by Latin name and an index of common names concludes the book. An indispensable companion for both the enthusiast and the botanist.

Customer Reviews:

One of the better books on my landscape books shelf........2004-08-26

To fill my information needs to provide the service of a Designer and Arborist, I've found that no single book is perfect, nor teaches every aspect:

Considering that, this book about Trees of North America is one of the better books for for illustrating plant parts like leaves, for plant Identification - for the money. It helps me help others.

Some books contain more tree species and cultivars - but be ready to spend 3 to 5 times more money too. And, many more expensive books, although the photos are nice, don't have the same side-by-side comparisons that this Trees of North America book has.

The photos of leaves, twigs, flowers and bark, are all enlarged sufficiently to see the details without "straining" or guessing.

If I need to take one book in-the-field with me, this is the one. The weight is appropriate for transport, and it gets the job done.

This is not what I'd call a cultural care book. It is a good plant ID and plant selection book. You will know if cones are too big, or the tree will be too small - or large.

Since tree care and selection requires several books - this will be one to include in that landscape library assortment. I own several other much more expensive books, but I still have this one, and it's not leaving my library.

A Bit Disappointing.......1999-10-13

I really looked forward to getting a copy of this book. I'm a big fan of the Random House series of plant books authored by Phillips and Rix and I was expecting something of the quality of their books on perennials and bulbs. Now the book is glossy, the photographs excellent and each tree listed is given a concise desciption of its habit and range. Particularly useful is the leaf identification guide, which is arranged in such a way that you don't have to know the meaning of "subacuminate" to discover the name of that tree you've been coveting in the neighbour's yard down the street. Unfortunately the book has several flaws. With a few exceptions, cultivars and varieties of the trees listed are not shown, so the book's usefulness, horticulturally speaking, is limited. Hardiness limits are not given. There are also some odd lapses in coverage. For example, _Cercis siliquastrum_ , Judas Tree, a European tree, is shown, while _Cercis canadensis_ , Redbud, the common North American native is not. That stalwart of the American south, the Live Oak (_Quercus virginiana_) is absent as well. For a book that purports to list "500 of the most common and important trees" this is very strange indeed. At the end of the day, the basic problem with this book is that it can't decide if it's aimed for the naturalist is the field or the horticultural enthusiast. Unfortunately, it will satisfy neither, as it is not a comprehensive guide. The beginning (and serious) gardener will want to consult instead one of Michael Dirr's excellent books; more sophisticated should see this book as a supplement, but not a replacement, for Dirr.

A Reunion of Trees: The Discovery of Exotic Plants and Their Introduction into North American and European Landscapes

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A genuine treat for tree lovers

A Reunion of Trees: The Discovery of Exotic Plants and Their Introduction into North American and European Landscapes
Stephen Spongberg , and Sam Bass, Jr. Warner
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Plant Hunters (PAJ Books)

ASIN: 0674766938

Customer Reviews:

A genuine treat for tree lovers.......2000-05-06

The title pretty much sums up the contents. Essentially a book to commemorate the ca 100 year existence of the Arnold Arboretum, this book contains a wealth of historical material. My personal favorite is the story on the "One Millon Dollar Tree".

What the title does not describe is the illustrations. There are a few color photographs, but also some exquisite colored-in line drawings and a lot of historical black&white material in a variety of techniques. Obviously someone resisted the pressure to conform to a preset style and chose those pictures which best fitted the subject, regardless of current fashion.

Should be a favourite for tree-lovers everywhere!

Customer Reviews:

A great tree book for the layperson.......2004-09-12

I checked this book out from the library and fell in love with it, so when it came time to return the book I promptly ordered my own copy.

Edlin's writing is clear and easy to understand, and there is a nice section at the start of the book that tells about how to recognize different trees, which ones flower before they leaf and vice versa, and other important details. I have a small Audubon book with photos and brief descriptions of common trees of America, but though Edlin's book is not much larger it really packs in much more information, and sometimes illustrations can show more than photos. The drawings for each type of tree include different seasons and show detail of things like the buds, flowers, and leaves.

The one drawback of The Tree Key is that if you want information on a very specific tree, you may not be able to find it as he takes one representative of the group (white willow, for instance) as an example and does not give as much information about other types. But for my purposes - research, learning and enjoyment - I have found this book a real treasure. I am using it as a reference for a novel I am writing which deals with trees.

Effects of Acid Deposition on the Forests of Europe and North America

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Effects of Acid Deposition on the Forests of Europe and North America
George H. Tomlinson
Manufacturer: CRC Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

The objective of this book is to outline the serious dangers to the soil and forest as a result of continuing emissions of acid-producing gases, thus pointing to the urgent need of their reduction. This volume reviews relevant information dealing with changes due to acidification of the soil and with the physiological processes of the tree involved in nutrient uptake, transfer, and utilization as well as with the nature and degree of damage that has occurred. Written in a comprehensive format, it discusses the importance of viable forests, the vital role of nutrients in the structure and physiology of the tree, and the relevance of prior dieback episodes. This is a valuable resource for those interested in forestry, environmental science, and the pulp and paper industry.

Field Guide to Trees of Britain, Europe and North America (Field Guide)

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Field Guide to Trees of Britain, Europe and North America (Field Guide)
Andrew Cleave
Manufacturer: Crowood Press, Limited, The
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1852238011

Forest Growth Responses to the Pollution Climate of the 21st

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Forest Growth Responses to the Pollution Climate of the 21st
Lucy J., Ed. Sheppard , Lucy J. Sheppard , and J. Neil Cape
Manufacturer: Kluwer Academic Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0792359917

Book Description

These proceedings consist of papers presented at the 18th IUFRO workshop on Forest Growth Responses to the Pollution Climate of the 21st Century, held in Edinburgh in September 1998.
Included are authoritative reviews and experimental evidence of forest growth responses in Europe and North America to the dominant components of air pollution, namely nitrogen and ozone, and their interactions with environmental influences. Nitrogen effects include changes in tree growth, nutrient status and biochemistry. Responses of root mycorrhiza and pathogenic fungi, and changes in trace gas fluxes and soil chemistry are also covered. Effects of the gaseous pollutants, O ₃, SO ₂ and O ₃/CO ₂ interactions, are discussed in terms of visible injury and biochemical changes. The role and methods of forest health monitoring programmes and the use of bioindicators are evaluated.
This book is primarily for people who want a better understanding of how and why forests respond to air pollution, and the implications for the stability of forest ecosystems.

An Oak Spring Pomona : A Selection of the Rare Books on Fruit in the Oak Spring Garden Library

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An Oak Spring Pomona : A Selection of the Rare Books on Fruit in the Oak Spring Garden Library
Sandra Raphael
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Pruning Shears-By-Pass, 3/4"

ASIN: 0300049366

Book Description

An Oak Spring Pomona is the second of a series of catalogues describing selections of rare books and other materials in the Oak Spring Garden Library, a collection formed by Rachel Lambert Mellon. The Pomona describes one hundred books and manuscripts about fruit, with illustrations taken from some of the most beautiful books on the subject, as well as from original drawings and paintings. The earliest book described is Bussato's Giardino di Agricoltura of 1592, the latest The Herefordshire Pomona, an encyclopaedia of apples and pears from the 1870s. In between there is a gathering of fruit books large and small: La Quintinie's Instruction pour les Jardins fruitiers, first published in 1690 and translated by John Evelyn three years later, Duhamel's Traite des Arbres fruitiers, and nearly fifty others from France and Britain, among them Brookshaw's giant Pomona Britannica and a handful of pocket-sized books of directions for grafting and cultivating the best varieties available. Sections on fruit-growing in these two countries are followed by others on fruit elsewhere in Europe (including the books of Knoop, Gallesio, and Bivort) and fruit in America (with Downing, Hovey, and several sets of nuserymen's plates), with chapters on citrus fruit (beginning with Ferrari's Hesperides of 1646), apples and pears, peaches and soft fruit, grapes, melons, and tropical fruit. Each description makes clear the background of the book concerned and its relationship to others, while a generous number of illustrations in color and black and white help to give the impression of their contents. Many of the Oak Spring copies have particularly interesting associations, recorded in inscriptions, bookplates, or binding details, all of which are described.

In these descriptive, discursive catalogues a strictly chronological arrangement has been abandoned in favor of grouping books related by their subject, in order to emphasize their connections. Although there is a brief bibliographical summary of each book, the background essays give the Oak Spring catalogues a historical setting that should appeal not only to book collectors and librarians, but also to garden historians, botanists, and all those interested in fruit cultivation and gardening in general.

1990, 320 pages. 9-5/8 x 11-1/4 inches, including 170 illustrations, over 70 of them in color.

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Primulas of Europe and America
G.F. Smith , B. Burrow , and D.B. Lowe
Manufacturer: AGS Publications Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Shrubs | Gardening & Horticulture | Home & Garden | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0900048417

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Amero-Australian treefrogs: An entry from Thomson Gale's Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia
William E., PhD Duellman
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Veterinary | Encyclopedias | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000M59QBC

Book Description

Gale proudly presents the completely revised and updated version of the acclaimed â€œGrzimek's Animal Life Encyclopediaâ€ set. Hailed by many as the best reference work on animals ever published, a legacy left to us by famed zoologist and animal lover Bernhard Grzimek, this set is renowned for its scientific reporting and coverage, and serves as a major point of reference for researchers, students, and those hoping to satisfy their curiosity about the animal kingdom. Information can be found on life cycles, predators, food systems, overall ecology and much more. Staying true to the original scientific pedigree, Gale enlisted prominent advisors and contributors from the international scientific community to incorporate recent developments in our knowledge of the animal world.

Book Description

INTRODUCTION

What we now know as China began to emerge four to five thousand years ago, in the fertile flatlands of the middle Yellow River. In the second millennium BC first the shadowy Xia, then the Shang, and finally the cultivated Zhou dynasty created an integrated, expansive kingdom that spread north, east and south, swallowing up smaller, now mainly forgotten states and peoples. Then in 221 BC the semi-alien Qin, coming from the Wei River valley in the west, forged the `empire' itself, centred on the same heartland.

In due course, the territories ruled from the `dragon throne' stretched from Mongolia to Vietnam, and from Korea to the Pamir Mountains. But for the `Han' Chinese (as the dominant people often call themselves) lengthening frontiers were a continuous challenge. Successive waves of `barbarian' troublemakers from the north and west threatened the divine order at the centre. As China prospered, so its expanding borders demanded protection. At times, the effort proved too much. In the 13th century China was itself conquered by the Mongols, and in the 17th by the longer-lasting Manchu Qing. Indeed, if we judge Marxism-Leninism to be an alien intrusion, then for the last eight hundred years China has only been self-governed during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the war-torn early 20th century.

More persuasively, it is claimed that Chinese communism, for all its anti-imperialist rhetoric, has in fact restored the `Middle Kingdom' (the Chinese empire), ruling through a bureaucracy reminiscent of the Confucian mandarins who managed China's affairs for almost 2000 years. Like its imperial antecedents, the Beijing politburo also rules a vast territory. Officially, 91 percent of an equally vast population (at 1.3 billion the world's largest) are Han Chinese. The remaining nine or ten percent - made up of Tibetans, Uigurs, Yao and a host of other minorities - together comprise a population that exceeds the combined totals of Italy and Spain.

Separatism within its borders has been another persistent theme in China's history. Even the Han themselves are prone to division, as recurrent stand-offs between north and south testify - not to mention other pulls such as Sichuan and Yunnan. But the commanding contemporary example of internal discontent must be Tibet. While the oppression of the Tibetan people is widely condemned, what is less understood is how, historically, Tibet personifies the central dilemma of the Chinese imperium. Tibet's western borders, once secured, are eminently defensible; the western borders of China proper without Tibet are far less so.

That China still constitutes an empire is self-evident. Whether Han or otherwise, its people are subject to an authoritarian regime that owes its existence to past conquest and continuing force. Genuinely democratic institutions are few and far between, either on the peripheries, or in the heartlands. China is still recovering from Mao Zedong's experiment in iconoclastic totalitarianism and as long as the Communist Party cherishes the notion of a nation organically unified under its own direction, Mao's legend as the `Great Helmsman' cannot be casually dismissed.

Pragmatically, the line officially promulgated by the People's Republic is that Mao's policies were 30 percent wrong, but 70 percent right. By such legerdemain, from the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping sponsored economic reform. But as the miserable showdown in Tiananmen Square demonstrated in 1989, political reform remains largely off-limits. At one end of the contemporary spectrum are government-approved, as also government-unapproved, millionaires; at the other, in both town and countryside, is a distressed underclass that can no longer rely on state socialism for basic life-support, but whose grievances, however acute, are, without representative institutions, politically insignificant.

China at the beginning of the 21st century, therefore, is not so very different from China at the beginning of the 19th, 16th, 12th or the 8th. It continues to abide by its own political traditions. Yet away from politics, China reveals another facade. While its historic high culture, as expressed in its art and literature, is predictably idiosyncratic, when it comes to its material culture there is far more of a continental, even global, homogeneity.

In this respect, the key engine has been the steppe corridor, leading out of the Yellow River basin through Gansu, and linking the Pacific to the Mediterranean. From the 1st century this became known as the Silk Road, enabling a patchy, but mutually enriching commodity exchange between East and West. But as archeology increasingly demonstrates, the same steppe highway functioned as Eurasia's umbilical throughout pre-history, serving as a conduit for primary technological transfer: the wheel, horsepower, metallurgy, and before those the woman-based industrial art of weaving. In its early stages, such transfer was mainly West-East, or rather it radiated west and east from around the Black Sea region. Later, however, it became East-West. As well as silk, the Chinese gave us printing, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the stern-rudder - not to mention peaches and ice cream.

Today, it is broadly accepted that Chinese material culture during the Tang and Song dynasties was more advanced than anywhere else on the planet, and that for many centuries western Eurasia was a net beneficiary of Chinese innovation. Perhaps though, in the wider chronology, the precise order and rate of exchange is secondary to the sense of a shared human endeavour, underpinned by shared capacities to which different centres of civilization contribute at different times, both as makers and as users.

The Chinese then are our collaborators, far more than potential competitors or enemies. Like ourselves, they have marched on foreign soils, though no Chinese gunboat has ever approached a European or American shore in anger. It should also be recalled how, from the 17th century onwards, it was not some wild horde issuing from the Gobi or Taklamakan desert that unhinged the complex equilibrium of Chinese civilization, but our own venal and often brutal ancestry.

Customer Reviews:

Concise Overview.......2005-12-25

I bought this book at Frankfurt airport and it has been an eye opener. It should be stressed that this series of books is physically tiny and each book can almost fit into your pocket.

An excellent time-line summary of Chinese history. There are intermittent, approximately one page long explications of various issues/people in Chinese history.

Well illustrated, though it's tiny size limits it maps. The lack of maps makes some points of its text difficult to follow.

The bibliography is extensive and will direct the interested further along.

Overall, if your new to Chinese history, or need an easy to refer to general overview, this book is for you.

Chinese History for Travelers .......2004-09-13

Reviewed by David Ewing, US-China Peoples Friendship Association, Co-Chair, San Francisco, 9/4/04

This pocket history of China is part of the Rough Guide travel book series from Great Britain. The publisher also produces a good general travel guide on China and a less satisfactory phrasebook that suffers from a misguided attempt to convert Pinyin (Chinese Romanization) into English sounds.

The Rough Guide History of China is a unique resource for travelers. This ambitious book is a complete outline of Chinese history from Neolithic times through 2001, in a paperback pocket volume that measures four inches by five and one-half inches, and is only one inch thick. It may be comfortably carried in a jacket pocket.

The history is presented in a chronological outline that will please history buffs but can be bewildering at times because of the immense compression of events and names to fit the small format. The type is clear and readable, if not large. The saving grace of the book is the two hundred or so short essays scattered through the timeline that explain the important events and dramatis personae of China's long history. I noticed several minor factual mistakes such as the misspelling of Pinyin names. Wang Jinwei, a colorful scoundrel from the Nationalist period, has his given name rendered as "Jingmei" on page 364 and in the index. More troubling than the minor errors is the book's attempt to conform to the most conventional, and least controversial, presentation of historical events.

Much of Chinese history is subject to contending interpretations. The modern period beginning with the anti-colonial struggle, World War II, and the eventual success of the Communist movement are given a bland factual treatment that sometimes lapses into conventional prejudice. I especially disliked the author's reliance on Li Zhisui's sensational "The Private Life of Chairman Mao", which is now generally regarded as an insider's fabrication by most China scholars.

The book is strong on China's early history and is therefore a wonderful new resource for travelers visiting ancient sites. The index permits one to quickly locate information about cities, people or events that a travel guidebook could not hope to cover. I think any traveler will find The Rough Guide History of China to be an entertaining read. The advantage of the chronological presentation is that it can be put down and picked up again without losing one's place when the exigencies of travel disrupt your reading.

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Top 500 US Shares

Powerful

Morningstar Stocks 500, 2005 Edition
Inc. Morningstar
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market

ASIN: 0471710288

Book Description

A handy reference to the top 500 stocks in the market
Morningstar Stocks 500 provides readers with comprehensive one-page reports that contain the essential information investors need to understand a company and its stock. Each page summarizes what the company does, how its past growth stacks up to its industry peers, how high its profitability has been, and how strong its finances are. Morningstar Stocks 500 also includes exclusive Morningstar tools-such as star ratings for stocks and stock grades.

Customer Reviews:

Top 500 US Shares.......2005-10-23

Good coverage of top line US shares. Explanation of purpose of company and a little of its history.
More details about dividend history would have been beneficial as well as share splits if any.
Good publication to get background information.

Powerful.......2005-10-01

Stock junkies will certainly enjoy it.

If you're not serious about stocks, this one is not for you.

If you are, the analytical acumen here will blow you away.

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