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BOOKS, ARTICLES, & NEWSLETTERS
MY E-NEWSLETTER
1. My Bimonthly E-Newsletter discussing topics of botany, geology, and other aspects of natural history. To join the mailing list for this free service, contact me at rwauctor1@cs.com.
MY OWN BOOKS & ARTICLES
3. Wiggers, Raymond. 1999. "Mushrooms: Exploring Chicagoland's Middle Kingdom." Chicago Wilderness Magazine 3, no.1: 5-9.
4. Wiggers, Raymond. 1994. The Plant Explorer's Guide to New England. Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press. ISBN 0878423060. Currently out of print, but available at BookFinder.com, etc.
OTHER, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED POPULAR-SCIENCE WORKS
(Works that are especially well written are preceded by an asterisk.)
1. Crum, Howard. 1992. A Focus on Peatlands and Peat Mosses. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472093789.
2. Kohnke, Helmut and D. P. Franzmeier. 1995. Soil Science Simplified. 4th ed. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. ISBN 0881338133.
3. * Peattie, Donald Culross. 1948. A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395581745.
4. * Peattie, Donald Culross. 1950. A Natural History of Western Trees. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 03955817535.
5. Evans, Howard Ensign. 1993. Pioneer Naturalists: The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0805023399.
6. Attenborough, David. 1995. The Private Life of Plants. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. ISBN 0691006393.
7. Bartram, William. 1980. The Travels of William Bartram. N.p.: Peregrine Smith Books. ISBN 0879050799.
8. Kalm, Pehr. 1937. Peter Kalm's Travels in North America. New York: Dover. ISBN 0486254232.
9. Hudler, George W. 1998. Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. ISBN 0691028737.
GUIDES TO PLANT FAMILIES
1. Cullen, James. 1997. Identification of Flowering Plant Families. London: Cambridge Univ. Press. A small but helpful softcover handbook.
2. Zomlefer, Wendy B. 1994. Guide to Flowering Plant Families. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807844705. A large-format softcover. Dr. Zomlefer, who generally follows Thorne's taxonomic system rather than Cronquist's, has provided botanical illustration of angiosperm families that are nothing less than superb. Highly recommended.
BOTANIC GARDENS, ARBORETA, & OTHER INSTITUTIONS
2. The website of the Australian National Botanic Gardens, Canberra, Australia is paticularly rich in information: http://www.anbg.gov.au/anbg/index.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pat Goldfein for this recommendation.
4. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.: (one of my personal favorites): http://www.bbg.org/.
7. Fairchild Tropical Garden, Coral Gables, Florida, U.S.A.: http://www.ftg.org/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Lynn Foosaner-Ohlsen for this recommendation.
8. Missouri Botanic Garden, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.: (one of my personal favorites): http://www.mobot.org/.
10. National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kalaheo, Hawaii, U.S.A.: (one of my personal favorites): http://www.ntbg.org/.
12. Royal Botanic Gardens, Burlington, Ontario, Canada: http://www.rbg.ca/index2.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pat Goldfein for this recommendation.
14. Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia: http://www.rbgsyd.gov.au/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pat Goldfein for this recommendation.
15. Selby Botanical Gardens, Sarasota, Florida, U.S.A.: http://www.selby.org/index.htm. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Ann Davis for this recommendation.
16. Ventnor Botanic Garden, Isle of Wight, U.K.: http://www.botanic.co.uk/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pat Goldfein for this recommendation.
17. Botanica, the Witchita Gardens, in Witchita, Kansas: http://www.botanica.org. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Jena Olsen for this recommendation.
18. Described by UNESCO as the world's oldest botanic garden, the Orto Botanico di Padova (Botanic Garden of Padua, Italy) dates from the mid-sixteenth century and has a number of websites that describe it rather fleetingly. This Padua University site is one of the better ones: http://www.ortobotanico.unipd.it/orto-ingl.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Claudette Bruschuk for this recommendation.
BOTANICAL "HOT SPOTS" IN THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION
1. My old stomping grounds in Italy, the Auruncian Mountains, are now a national park, and for good reason. (See my photos of this area in the Italy section of my Plants of the Mediterranean Gallery and my Mediteranean Geology Gallery.) This website -- http://www.parcoaurunci.it/ -- is in Italian, but if you approach it through such search engines as Google, you can get an English "translation," which is always good for a hearty laugh. To quote the linguistic wizardry of Google: "In the entirety one less has a landscape with soft shapes, degrading towards S and SW, articulated in ridges lengthened in meridian and/or Appennine direction separated from depressed areas and fluvial recordings more or embedded." Don't let that deter you. The site has maps and plenty of other illustrations.
2. Italy's Abruzzo National Park has an English-version website with much information about the mountain ecosystems of central Italy: http://www.pna.it/e_index.htm.
BOTANICAL "HOT SPOTS" IN THE MIDWESTERN UNITED STATES
3. One of the great botanical showplaces for spring-ephemeral wildflowers and bottomland forest is Ryerson Conservation Area, near the Chicago, Illinois suburb of Deerfield. Here's its website: http://www.ryersonwoods.org/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Joyce Streff for this recommendation.
6. Jo Daviess County, in the northwestern corner of Illinois, is part of the magnificent, hilly, and essentially unglaciated Driftless Area. The Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation's website, http://www.jdcf.org, describes that fine organization's advocacy of preserving this priceless landscape. Note especially the description of Schurmeier Forest, near the town of Elizabeth.
BOTANICAL "HOT SPOTS" IN THE NORTHEASTERN UNITED STATES
1. Quoddy Head State Park, Maine. This skimpy web page expends far too much verbiage on the park's lighthouse, and so panders to that latest fad of nature-blind tourists, but the park itself is unexcellable. It's home to a completely accessible raised bog, a taiga community of conifers an other boreal species, marine life, magnificent geology, and a sense of the sacred that is second to none on this planet. Here, for what it is, is the web page: http://www.state.me.us/cgi-bin/doc/parks/find_one_name.pl?park_id=10.
3. Mike Baker's Plants of the New Jersey Pine Barrens provides excellent photos that are a tantalizing glimpse into the intriguing and rarely encountered flora of this botanical wonderland: http://www.mikebaker.com/plants/plants.html.
CLUBS & ORGANIZATIONS
1. Sick of poodle plants, doughnut maples, and the tyranny of turf? Check out the delightful, Seattle-based organization Plant Amnesty: http://www.plantamnesty.org/. It may sound like the grim and self-righteous worst of eco-causes, but in fact it is a refreshing blend of real landscape-improvement advocacy and dry wit. The Amazing Yard Art display on the home page is in itself worth the visit. (Imagine anyone with a political cause having a sense of humor: could this be a model for the twenty-first century? We can hope, without holding our collective breath.)
2. The American Orchid Society is one of the best run and most educational of all botanical and horticultural societies. Their superb OrchidWeb site: http://orchidweb.org/.
3. The Bromeliad Society International is another terrific organization dedicated to an equally terrific family of plants. The BSI website: http://bsi.org/.
4. The informative site of the Indiana Native Plant and Wildflower Society (INPAWS): http://www.inpaws.org/index.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Shannon Hackett for this recommendation.
5. The Palm and Cycad Society of Australia has terrific information and photo galleries devoted to the two types of plants it's devoted to: http://www.pacsoa.org.au/.Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Claudette Bruschuk for this recommendation.
6. The Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation is an organization dedicated to the preservation of one of the Midwestern U.S.'s most beautiful and botanically significant landscapes -- the Driftless Area of northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. Its website: http://www.jdcf.org.
CYCADS
ETHNOBOTANY & ECONOMIC BOTANY
1. Dr. Jim Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases, brought to you by the Agricultural Research Service, offers a search function that allows you to look up the uses of specific plant species, to investigate specific properties of plant chemicals, and much more: http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/.
2. The Plants for a Future website aptly describes itself as "a resource centre for rare and unusual plants, particularly those which have edible, medicinal or other uses." It's an encyclopedic source listing all sorts of plant applications: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/.
3. The University of Michigan-Dearborn Native American Ethnobotany Database gives much information on the "foods, drugs, dyes, and fibers of native North American peoples." Highly recommended: http://www.umd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/herb.
6. Professor Mark Rieger at the University of Georgia has produced the Mark's Fruit Crops website -- http://www.uga.edu/fruit/index.html It's an excellent resource for anyone researching the botanical and economic significance of fruits and cultivated fruit-bearing plants. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Katherine Sheppard for this recommendation.
7. The Department of Plant Sciences of Tel Aviv University has this Plants and Judaism page showing the historical significance of Israel's economic plants, with photos of the plants and ancient artifacts: http://www.tau.ac.il/lifesci/botany/judaism.htm. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pat Goldfein for this recommendation.
8. The University of Washington Medicinal Herb Garden website has images of the plant species in the garden's collection: http://nnlm.gov/pnr/uwmhg/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Carrie Collin for this recommendation.
GENERAL INFORMATION, INCLUDING GLOSSARIES
2. One of the most widely used undergraduate-level botany texts is Biology of Plants, by Raven, Evert, and Eichorn. The publisher, W. H. Freeman & Company, has this companion website for the text: http://www.whfreeman.com/raven/.
5. The U.S. Department of Agriculture PLANTS National Database is a treasure chest of information about native U.S. plants and more -- there are photo galleries, state species checklists, and much more: http://plants.usda.gov/.
6. The Botany section of the helpful but rather bureaucratic-sounding National Biological Information Infrastructure: http://www.nbii.gov/disciplines/botany/index.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Margery Breit for this recommendation.
7. The "information unlimited -- under construction forever" omnibus site Botany Online is offered in its English-language version by the University of Hamburg, Germany: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e00/default.htm. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany students Felix Becker, Barbara Bouton, and Kathy Monroe for this recommendation. That a number of my students have used and liked this site is high praise.
GOING NATIVE: LANDSCAPING WITH INDIGENOUS & ECOLOGICALLY COMPATIBLE PLANTS
1. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's excellent Green Landscaping with Native Plants website: http://www.epa.gov/greenacres/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Donna Blanchard for this recommendation.
KIDS: INFORMATION & ACTIVITIES
1. Most "Master Gardener" information given out by extension services and botanical gardens is just too rudimentary and unchallenging for veteran gardeners or persons with a high-school or college biology background, and it's best used by inquisitive elementary and middle-school students. I recommend the following Oregon State University Extension Service Botany Basics site for that use: http://www.orst.edu/extension/mg/botany/index.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Lois Cross for this recommendation.
2. The Botany Department of South Africa's University of the Western Cape has a delightful Ecotree site: http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/ecotree/index.htm. It colorfully illustrates and describes the ecology, anatomy, and physiology of trees and other plants. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Mary Pendergast for this recommendation.
3. The Michigan 4-H Foundation at Michigan State University has this Children's Garden site: http://www.4hgarden.msu.edu/main.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Fran Fairman for this recommendation.
PALEOBOTANY & PLANT EVOLUTION
1. Probably the one best clearinghouse for fossil-plant enthusiasts is that of the Paleobotany Research Group of University Muenster, Germany. This admirable resource has its own store of information and images, as well as a host of rated links. This is the page to start at: http://www.uni-muenster.de/GeoPalaeontologie/Palaeo/Palbot/ebot.html.
2. The Integrative Biology 181/181L course outline and lab exercises published by the University of California, Berkeley at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/IB181/HpageIB181.html can teach the person interested in fossil plants and plant evolution much about this fascinating field. Make sure that you click on the "Virtual Paleobotany Laboratory" pages.
4. The superb website of the University of California, Berkeley Paleontology Museum has excellent sections on plant evolution and fossil plants (be persistent and visit the different pages and links): http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/plants/plantae.html.
7. The Florida Natural History Museum's Paleobotany and Palynology page -- http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/paleobotany/paleobotany.htm -- has links to the museum's Plaeobotany Image Gallery and to a Paleontological Resources section that has its own link to an interesting "Collecting Fossil Plants" page. The latter is of special interest to students of petrified wood. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Dr. Carol Ward for this recommendation.
9. Cor Kwant's The Ginkgo Pages site has a paleobotanical section on this ever-popular living fossil, and much other interesting information as well: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kwanten/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Pam Ryan for this recommendation.
PEATLANDS: BOGS & FENS
PHOTOS, ILLUSTRATIONS, & ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIAS
1. The Internet Orchid Photo Encyclopedia: http://www.orchidspecies.com/. Compiler Jay Pfahl has done a magnificent job with this site. This very extensive listing of orchid species (NOT grexes or cultivars) will fascinate even those not all that interested in the world's largest plant family.
2. The Hortus Botanicus Catinensis site of the University of Catania, Sicily has an extensive photo collection of Mediterranean plants. The photos can be slow-loading. When you've reached the English-version web page, http://www.dipbot.unict.it/orto/boga.html, click on the photo of the university building in the middle of the page. That will give you the options for searching for plant taxa.
3. The PLANTS Gallery section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture PLANTS National Database features images of native U.S. plant species: http://plants.usda.gov/gallery.html.
4. James Mauseth, of the Integrative Biology Department of the University of Texas, has a fascinating Plant Anatomy website that features many micrographs of plant tissues and cell structure : http://www.esb.utexas.edu/mauseth/weblab/. This is amost helpful resource for the serious student of botany. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Mary Pendergast for this recommendation.
5. The Noble Foundation of Ardmore, Oklahoma has this excellent Plant Image Gallery of herbaceous and woody plants native to the South Central states and in many cases far
Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany students Anne Marie Farnum and Jeff Rivlin for this recommendation.
8. The University of Chicago's online collection, American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936, features images taken by groundbreaking ecologist Henry Cowles and others: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/award97/icuhtml/aephome.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Sherry Byrne for this recommendation.
9. The Digital Library Project of University of California, Berkeley has this CalPhotos collection of plant images; the main emphasis seems to be on species of the western United States. There is also easy access to images of fungi, landscapes, and habitats. The address is http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/flowers/. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Barbara Bouton for this recommendation.
PHYTOGEOGRAPHY (PLANT GEOGRAPHY) & ECOLOGY
2. Ken Robertson at the Illinois Natural History Survey has this this very informative Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois site: http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu/~kenr/tallgrass.html. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Mary Handelsman for this recommendation.
3. The Illinois Plant Information Network (ILPIN) offers this list of over 3,000 vascular-plant taxa in Illinois: http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/delaware/ilpin/ilpin_allspp.html. The site provides detailed descriptions of each plant and county-by-county distribution maps. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Tori Trauscht for this recommendation.
TAXONOMY, PLANT NAMES, & FAMILY AFFILIATIONS
1. My favorite site of this category is the Missouri Botanic Garden W3 Tropicos website for worldwide plant nomenclature: http://mobot.mobot.org/W3T/Search/vast.html. This search engine does not list common names of plant taxa, but it does often show distribution maps and selected plant illustrations.
2. The International Plant Names Index: http://www.ipni.org/. This site, covering the world's gymnosperms and angiosperms, is a collaboration between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Harvard University Herbaria; and the Australian National Herbarium.
3. The Flora Europaea database, maintained by Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh: http://193.62.154.38/FE/fe.html. As its name indicates, this is for European flora.
4. An excellent look at conifers, cycads, and other naked-seed plants : the Gymnosperm Database, http://www.conifers.org/.
7. Want to check if the taxonomic name of a U.S.plant taxon is still valid? Check out the list of Excluded and Anomalous Names page of the U.S. Department of Agriculture PLANTS National Database: http://plants.usda.gov/topics.html.
8. Professor Ray Phillips at Colby College has created a fascinating and detailed Flowering Plant Taxonomy site. It includes an angiosperm-family key, a checklist of Northeastern-U.S. species, and much more: http://www.colby.edu/info.tech/BI211. Hearty thanks to my adult-education botany student Meredith Tucker for this recommendation.
To join my free Bimonthly E-Newsletter mailing list, drop me a line at rwauctor1@cs.com.
