The Book of Forest & Thicket: Trees, Shrubs, and Wildflowers of Eastern North America

by John Eastman, Amelia Hansen (Illustrator)

Fact and folklore that explore the details of common plant and animal communities east of the rockies.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Science

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful guide to plants you will find in the woods with a great deal of information on each. I read it from cover to cover. It's set up alphabetically. Not good for identification. For that i would use The Sibley Guide to Trees, A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs: Northeastern and north-central United States and southeastern and south-central Canada, and A Field Guide to Wildflowers : Northeastern and North-Central North America. if you like this one, try to find Stokes's wonderful The Natural History of Wild Shrubs and Vines

[Mark Hartzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little book that is not really a field guide, but as the author describes; “We want to understand this life form not only as an individual (plant), but also as an interdependent element of its habitat. That’s the focus of this book: to explore the details of certain organisms and their communities (including the human community) and to advance beyond the scope and intentions of the field guide.”

The subtitle of the book is “Trees, Shrubs, and Wildflowers of Eastern North America”. Mr. Eastman covers in detail over 80 different plants found in the eastern half of the continent, and primarily in the mid to northern portion. Many of the various plants are treated to excellent illustrations by Amelia Hansen, who provides an invaluable service with her vivid drawings.

Here is Eastman describing Hawthorns on p. 96: “The hawthorn genus is an exceedingly troublesome one. Unless you’re a botanist specializing in these plants, you won’t even try to key them down to proper species. Even such specialists widely disagree on how many North American hawthorn species exist; ‘splitters’ say more than a thousand, ‘lumpers’ claim less than a hundred. Many botanists believe that the huge variations seen in Crataegus may have resulted from clearing and disruption of the original forests in eastern North America as pioneers settled the country. This opening-up of the landscape gave hawthorn species the chance to hybridize and colonize on a scale previously unavailable to them, thus enlarging the gene pool.” One of Hansen’s illustrations shows a frog impaled on a hawthorn spike by a loggerhead shrike. Pretty cool.

The book is filled with naturalist lore and observations that are more in depth than what is typically found in a field guide. A worthwhile addition to anyone who wants to understand a little more about the outdoor world we inhabit. 4 stars

[Dan Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was more of a field kind than a narrative sort of nature book. So I skipped around and read the entries for some of the species that most interested me.