A "great" guide? I'd like one too, and I live here. Let me/us know what you
find!
Do you want one with pix or a flora. Lugging around the "new" Jepson/Hickman
requires superhuman strength and stamina. I tried to talk Hickman into
putting it disk form before it was published, but he would have none of it.
I was, as usual, crying in the wilderness--so to speak . . .
There's Munz' Southern California Flora, and it stood me in good stead for
many years, but it's no lightweight either, and the nomenclature is not
up-to-date, of course. (Damned taxonomists! I jest, of course.)
Munz also wrote some regional and "type" (trees, shrubs, wildflowers,
grasses) field guides that were small paperbacks with pix, and they were
pretty good supplements to the floras, but you'd play hell finding, for
example, Stipa cernua ("A perfectly good species," G. Ledyard Stebbins once
told me . . .) in recently published floras--not even under Nasella.
I'm willing, even anxious, to change with the times, for better or for
worse. I started with a 1928 Jepson--California Flora that I bought from a
bookseller in 1956 for three dollars. I still have it--somewhere. Most of my
books are in boxes in storage, including the Jepson once owned by Sara
Schenk, who gave it to Gerald Charlton, who gave it to me. I wrote a short
piece about it for "Fremontia," the Journal of the California Native Plant
Society, but couldn't find it on-line (I think I wrote it in the 1980's, but
I don't remember for sure). Sara had covered it in awning-cloth, duct-taped
it, and attached grips made from old jeans, including a closure made from
the top button. What places it has been!
I look forward to being brought up-to-date on a more recently-published
GREAT field guide. Even if it's (ugh) digital.
WT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Jensen" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2013 12:26 PM
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] plant field guide for Southern California
I just moved from Washington to Southern California and I am looking for a
great plant identification field guide. Would someone refer me to a good
one?
Thanks in advance!
Paul Jensen
