A great wildflower guide that I became really accustomed to using. I think this is much better than the Peterson Guide for wildflowers, but that might just be me. A helpful key that enables the average person (completely unfamiliar with flowers) to still use it and identify what they're looking at.

I held off buying this because it covers the northeast US and I'm in the desert. However, it's a great book for learning classification and identification of plants.

When I picked up Newcomb's Wildflower Guide from the library, I didn't have a clue how to identify flowers using a book, and I was afraid I would be in over my head. I shouldn't have been worried: Newcomb's wildflower categorization is easy to pick up on, using readily understood visual cues like the number of petals on a flower, flower color, and leaf type. I was able to identify almost every flower I was trying to name, and I'm as amateur as it gets.

Using this guide is infinitely faster and less frustrating than trying to figure out flower names online, and the illustrations are very well-done and helpful. I do wish more illustrations had been in color, but the black-and-white drawings are still effective.

When I first became interested in flowers, I was recommended this book, but dismissed it as "too hard" with its dense, small font, line drawings, and botanical terminology. After getting frustrated with guides that seemed organized in no particular way, so that you had to look through each page to find the flower you were looking for, I came back to this and realized that with a bit of vocabulary learning it really is the easiest way to zero in on a specific plant. It's an ingenious choose-your-own-adventure that basically emulates an app before they had the technology to do that. You answer questions about the plant, and each answer sends you to another page of questions, until you've identified a specific plant. It works nearly every time (at least here in Massachusetts), and it feels like magic.

Couple of tips:

It is crucial to have the plant in front of you, so you can answer questions you would not have thought to take notes on, even with a detailed illustration.

Occasionally you answer a question wrong (you said the plant had no leaves but in fact the specimen you found is missing its leaves, something like that), and you have to go back and redo it from that point. Finger-bookmark any questions you're unsure about.

Having a more recent guide with photos on hand to double-check the answer is helpful since I often found that the black-and-white line drawings weren't always enough to make me confident in my ID. (I use [b:Wildflowers of New England|24944952|Wildflowers of New England|Ted Elliman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447600226s/24944952.jpg|44603378].) Also, the copy of Newcomb's I have is outdated and uses old Latin names, and newer guides will give you the more recent taxonomy.