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The Odyssey Book of American Wildflowers

出版	Odyssey Press, 1964
主題	Nature / Plants / Flowers
ISBN	030743575X9780307435750
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=mbcRaMkzhwgC&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Introduction: There may be-it is difficult to estimate-some fifteen thousand species of flowering plants growing wild in NOrth America. There are, for instance, between four and five thousand in the northeastern quarter of the continent; four thousand in the Rocky Mountains; over three thousand in Arizona; about four thousand in California; over five thousand in the southeastern United States. Each of these regions has many species peculiar to itself: the cacti of the southwestern deserts, the violets and anemones of eastern woodlands, the Spanish-moss that hangs from southern trees. Each shares many species with other regions, so that we cannot simply add the figures for different parts of the continent to get the total; twenty per cent of all the flowering plants of Arizona, for instance, are introduced from elsewhere or are common to the whole continent. The figure I have given is little more than a guess; but it cannot be much too large. Moreover, these fifteen thousand species include many minor variants which are recognized and given names by botanists. It is obvious that no person can know all these plants; and that a manual or guide to them would form a set of ponderous volumes. Yet, for the amateur naturalist or wildflower lover, things are not so bad as the figures many suggest. First, many of the supposed fifteen thousand are trees and shrubs, most of which-oaks, elms, hickories, birches, alders, willows, pines, hemlocks, junipers, and others-have inconspicuous flowers (or cones) that are of interest only to the professional. Second, many other thousands of species are grasses and sedges and other plants with small greenish or brownish flowers hardly noticed by the amateur. Then there are many unlovely weeds-pigweeds, ragweeds, cockleburs, beggar-ticks, and such-that make us happiest by their absence. When we eliminate all these plants, we have what are generally known as wildflowers, all of interest to the layman for their beauty and some perhaps for their rarity, as well as to the botanist for reasons of his own. Of these there are perhaps six or eight thousand. To know all the wildflowers of North America even in this restricted sense is a formidable task even for a professional; and to describe and illustrate them all would still require a set of books-or one very large book. The present volume offers a selection from all this wealth of natural forms. The photographs and text embrace most of the colors and shapes and sizes of our wildflowers. They illustrate also the different types of plants that cover our varied landscape, and they represent the plant families by which the botanist creates some order in the apparently haphazard variety of nature.