Economic Botany has reviewed 65 floras since 2000. In mainland North America, six of those were the Flora of North America volumes; the others included Florida, the Gran Desierto and Rio Colorado Delta, the Intermountain Flora, Illinois, Missouri, North Central Texas, and Utah. Reviewers considered these contributions from "quaint" to "outstanding." I consider this the best yet.
All of these floras contain the basic identification keys, descriptions, ranges at least within the geographic area covered, phenology, synonymy, and the like. This book goes beyond that to include more on geographic ranges, discussions of taxonomically diverse opinions, and most important to readers of this journal, involvement with people.
Most of the comments previously made of Diggs at al. earlier book apply to this tome since the two have the same format, but this one contains more details. One of the welcome novelties is county range maps - including continuous dots along east-west highways for Sorghum halpense. This is a major improvement over the distributions given by county names, regions, and vegetational areas used by others.
Like their preceeding work on North Central Texas, this book contains appendices (25 of them!). The one that particularly caught my attention was #21 by Cole Weatherby on Commercially Important Timber Trees of East Texas. This contains the expected descriptions, historical uses, current uses, and "Other Significant Information," but the facing page for each species is outstanding. These have a county map, a line drawing, and color photographs of the wood, leaf, a branch, and the bark. That addition is unique in a flora. Another exceptional element is the Authors' Note. Here they make a plea that readers send them "corrections, suggestions, or additions" so they may be incorporated into volumes 2 and 3 (Dicots) currently being written.
The authors have again succeeded in achieving their goal to make a "flora more user-friendly." This flora will be useful for everyone; it is wonderfully done! Anyone examining this volume will anxiously await the next two.
- Daniel F. Austin, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tuscon, AZ 85743
The company of Diggs, Lipscomb & O'Kennon have done it again, this go-round adding Reed to the Film. Previously DLO had published Shinners & Mahler's Illustrated Flora of North Central Texas. I praised this behemoth in Taxon 48: 859.
Experience with the 1999 book has resulted in another colossus, the 1,612-page, same-dimension, same-price flora for East Texas, a 162,200 km2 area, a tad less then 24% of the entire state. The East Texas vascular flora totals 202 families, 1,079 genera, and 3,402 species, just over 67% of the total species known for Texas, but volume 1 treats only 1,060 species, 295 genera, and 68 families. These are alphabetically arranged among the pteridophytes, gymnosperms, and monocotyledons, respectively, 19/39/73, 3/4/9, 46/252/978 families/genera/species. The remaining two volumes will detail the dicotyledons, their respective numbers being 134/784/2342.
Volume 1 has a 242-page introduction to East Texas that is a book in itself. Pages 191-254 are printed on thinner, more porous pape, as is much of the rest of the book. Illustration is copious: all 1,060 species have B&W line drawings, almost all have maps, and nearly 200 species have color photos. The mapsare of the county dot-distribution type, with a single dot centered in the county. Texas, incidentally, has 254 roughly equal-sized counties in its 691,030 km2 area. Thus this type of mapping is much more meaningful than for a state like california, with its 411,048 km2 area divided into only 58 counties ranging in size.
The 2006 East Texas Flora is very similar in format to the 199 North Central Texas Flora, as might be expected nowadays due to the magic of computers. Both of these truly Texas-size floras are chock-full with information (both pictures and text, including 25 appendices in the 2006 book - 15 in the 1999 opus) and are very user-friendly. Both excellent floras are landmark achievements.
- Rudolf Schmid, University of California
