On 1 Oct 2000, RTShaw80 at aol.com wrote:

> I'm looking for reference and identification guides to the Trees,
> shrubs, ferns, wildflowers, etc... that encompasses all of Western
> Washington...If you have any
> recommendations for eastern Washington, or Pacific-Northwest flora
> references, I'd appreciate knowing about them aswell,

For general (i.e. non-technical) use, two plant ID guides published
by Lone Pine will cover a goodly part of your territory. One is
Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and Mackinnon; the
other is Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia by Parish,
Coupe & Lloyd which sorta works for the North Cascades and Okanogan
Highlands, at least along the border. Just beware that Lone Pine's
plant guides have lousy technical keys. In Olympia, Orca Books
usually stocks the PNW Coast book, but they can order the other one
for you.

A really neat little pocket flora is Manual of Oregon Trees and
Shrubs published by Oregon State University Book Stores, Inc. Very
understandable vegetative and winter twig keys.

For wetlands plants, my favorite is A Field Guide to the Common
Wetlands Plants of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon co-
published by Seattle Audubon and the Wash Native Plant Society. I
find this book much more useful in Washington than is Lone Pine's
Wetland Plants of Oregon and Washington which is very tightly focused
on the Willamette Valley.

For the coastal dunes -- and all you Ocean Shores fans will
appreciate this one -- a great little book is the newly updated
Plants of the Oregon Coastal Dunes (Wiedemann, Smith & Dennis)
published by Oregon State University Press. It also includes a good
over-view of the geology and vegetation history of the dunes.

My old standby technical flora though, is Flora of the Pacific
Northwest, the condensation of the 5-volume Vascular Plants of the
Pacific Northwest. I believe I saw a few new copies of this in Orca
last week.

You'll also want to check out the computer-based floras published by
XID Services -- go to http://www.xidservices.com

Not a flora, but a really good book on the forest and steppe
communities of the PNW is Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington
published by the US Forest Service (General Technical Report PNW-8)
but surprisingly available. It's a technical book for land managers,
but if you know a bit of botany and forestry it's a great
introduction to the plant community ecology of our area.

I've been keeping a field journal on the habitat associations of
birds for 25 years now, and there's no better way to begin to
understand those kind of relationships. I strongly encourage you to
do the same.


****************
Douglas Canning
Olympia, Washington
dcanning at igc.org
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