Field Guide to the Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes of the Northern United States | 
|  | | | Title: | Field Guide to the Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes of the Northern United States | | Author: | Edward Knobel | | Publisher: | Dover Publications | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 June, 1977 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 048623505X / 9780486235059 | | List Price: | $4.95 | | Amazon Price: | $4.95 | |
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| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
With its clear descriptions and accurate drawings, this easy-to-carry little volume will allow you to differentiate over 370 of the most common species: timothy, rye, foxtail, fescue, bluegrass, many more. Key. 500 illustrations. Updated nomenclature by Mildred F. Faust.
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Customer Reviews:
• Alright 06 August, 2005
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AAZF2ADSWUU80
• Okay But Not Great 30 December, 2007
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1MJMYLRTZ76ZX
• Good Book. Great Sketches 03 November, 2005
Decent book, the sketches are very helpful for attempting to key out species.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A30SY5NXE1VM61
• Of Little Use 07 April, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2T0JD959EIC27
• Limited And Incomplete 14 February, 2006
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A14S7OKTROV9F1
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