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Del Weniger presents a beautifully illustrated account of all the cacti found in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Cactus blossoms often rival the most exotic hothouse plants for delicate beauty. Depending upon the species, they range in color from white through almost the entire spectrum of the rainbow. Nearly every plant in the five-state area is here pictured in color, usually in full bloom.

The cactus was one of the most completely new and different plants encountered by Europeans in the Americas, and the larger species, at least, easily made their presence known to even the most unobservant passerby. To the observant the cactus in its surprising variety of forms has from the beginning exercised a strong fascination. The casual student may easily identify most specimens from these illustrations, and the more serious student will find detailed keys to all of the cacti of the area.

When the cactuses bloom in Big Bend National Park, their vivid pinks and purples, reds and yellows bring an unforgettable beauty to the rugged Chihuahuan Desert landscape. In fact, many people visit the park just see the cactus blossoms and the wildflowers. If you're one of them, this book will increase your enjoyment by helping you identify the wonders at your feet. And if you've never been to Big Bend when the cactuses are blooming, you'll discover here what you've been missing.

Douglas B. Evans describes twelve kinds of cactus—living rock, topflower, stout-spined, hedgehog, pineapple, button, barrel, fishhook, nipple, chollas and pricklypears, and Texas nipple—and their individual species known to occur in the park. Color photographs taken by Doris Evans and Ro Wauer accompany the species descriptions. As you hike or drive through the park, you can identify most of the cactuses you see simply by leafing through these splendid pictures and then checking the descriptions, which indicate the cactuses' characteristic features and habitat.

To make the book even more useful, Evans also briefly defines the parts of a cactus, explains how scientific names work, and offers a quick introduction to the geography and ecology of Big Bend National Park and the Chihuahuan Desert. With this information, you'll enjoy not only seeing the cactuses of the Big Bend but also being able to tell one from another and knowing just what makes each one special.

Drawing on the study of thousands of specimens, Carex of Illinois and Surrounding States: The Oval Sedges is an invaluable resource for botanists, ecologists, environmental engineers, and professional and amateur environmentalists interested in a deeper understanding of these essential plants.

Examines how Southern literary depictions of the natural world were influenced by the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s

Rieger studies the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four prominent Southern writers of the era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Specifically, he argues that these writers created new versions of an old literary mode—the pastoral—in response to the destabilizing effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Southern modernism, and the mechanization of agricultural jobs.

Mass deforestation, soil erosion, urban development, and depleted soil fertility are issues that come to the fore in the works of these writers. In response, each author depicts a network model of nature, where humans are part of the natural world, rather than separate, over, or above it, as in the garden pastorals of the Old South, thus significantly revising the pastoral mode proffered by antebellum and Reconstruction-era writers.

Each writer, Rieger finds, infuses the pastoral mode with continuing relevance, creating new versions that fit his or her ideological positions on issues of race, class, and gender. Despite the ways these authors represent nature and humankind’s place in it, they all illustrate the idea that the natural environment is more than just a passive background against which the substance of life, or fiction, is played out.

It has long been recognized that plants and animals profoundly affect one another’s characteristics during the course of evolution. However, the importance of coevolution as a dynamic process involving such diverse factors as chemical communication, population structure and dynamics, energetics, and the evolution, structure, and functioning of ecosystems has been widely recognized for a comparatively short time. Coevolution represents a point of view about the structure of nature that only began to be fully explored in the late twentieth century. The papers presented here herald its emergence as an important and promising field of biological research.

Coevolution of Animals and Plants is the first book to focus on the dynamic aspects of animal-plant coevolution. It covers, as broadly as possible, all the ways in which plants interact with animals. Thus, it includes discussions of leaf-feeding animals and their impact on plant evolution as well as of predator-prey relationships involving the seeds of angiosperms. Several papers deal with the most familiar aspect of mutualistic plant-animal interactions—pollination relationships. The interactions of orchids and bees, ants and plants, and butterflies and plants are discussed. One article provides a fascinating example of more indirect relationships centered around the role of carotenoids, which are produced by plants but play a fundamental part in the visual systems of both plants and animals.

Coevolution of Animals and Plants provides a general conceptual framework for studies on animal-plant interaction. The papers are written from a theoretical, rather than a speculative, standpoint, stressing patterns that can be applied in a broader sense to relationships within ecosystems.

Contributors to the volume include Paul Feeny, Miriam Rothschild, Christopher Smith, Brian Hocking, Lawrence Gilbert, Calaway Dodson, Herbert Baker, Bernd Heinrich, Doyle McKey, and Gordon Frankie.

Woody plants and cacti are vital staple foods for cattle, deer, and other wildlife in drought-prone South Texas. Ranchers, hunters, and land managers who need to identify these plants relied on A Field Guide to Common South Texas Shrubs (published by Texas Parks & Wildlife Press and distributed by UT Press), which is no longer in print. Responding to ongoing demand for the book, Richard B. Taylor has completely updated and expanded it with seven new species, new photographs, and a quick plant identification key.

Common Woody Plants and Cacti of South Texas is an easy-to-use plant identification field guide to fifty species that comprise an estimated 90 percent of the region’s woody canopy cover north of the Rio Grande Valley. The species accounts include photographs, descriptions, values to livestock and wildlife, and nutritional information. The book also provides historical perspectives and information on brush management techniques and strategies, as well as habitat appraisal. All of these resources will enable readers to analyze stocking rates for deer and cattle, evaluate a prospective hunting lease, or buy property.