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 A Guide to Common Plants of Lake Mead National Recreation Area is the definitive book for weekend explorers and botanists alike who venture into LMNRA ready to discover the many wonders of the local flora. The authors highlight 183 plants that hikers are most likely to encounter along popular trails, washes, and surrounding hot springs, helping the area’s millions of annual visitors identify and enjoy these common plants. This guide includes photos and descriptions of each plant, along with a map of LMNRA.
 
The authors also provide a primer on plant ecology, including a guide to plant structures, desert adaptations and life forms, plant-to-plant interactions, and plant-animal interactions. Plants are grouped by life forms, such as tree, shrub, cactus, or grass, and by flower color within the wildflower section. The guide will encourage readers to pause and look carefully at each plant they encounter, giving them an enriched experience during their exploration.

A Manual of Aquatic Plants can be said to be a classic; it made the identification of aquatic plants in sterile as well as in flowering or fruiting condition as simple as possible, and covers a region from Minnesota to Missouri and eastward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Virgina.

The paleoecological history of the Americas is as complex as the region is broad: stretching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, the New World features some of the most extraordinary vegetation on the planet. But until now it has lacked a complete natural history. Alan Graham remedies that with A Natural History of the New World. With plants as his scientific muse, Graham traces the evolution of ecosystems, beginning in the Late Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago) and ending in the present, charting their responses to changes in geology and climate.

            By highlighting plant communities’ roles in the environmental history of the Americas, Graham offers an overdue balance to natural histories that focus exclusively on animals. Plants are important in evolution’s splendid drama. Not only are they conspicuous and conveniently stationary components of the Earth’s ecosystems, but their extensive fossil record allows for a thorough reconstruction of the planet’s paleoenvironments. What’s more, plants provide oxygen, function as food and fuel, and provide habitat and shelter; in short, theirs is a history that can speak to many other areas of evolution.

A Natural History of the New World is an ambitious and unprecedented synthesis written by one of the world’s leading scholars of botany and geology. 

Aloe vera is one of the most important cultivated medicinal plants and a key component of the floras of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar. Here, for the first time since the 1960s, is a comprehensive account of all currently accepted aloe taxa in an easy-to-use and accessible format. Organized by habitat and size, entries for more than five hundred species each include descriptions, illustrations, and diagnostic features, accompanied by information on distribution, habitat, and relationship to other Aloe species. This volume is a must-have not only for succulent plant enthusiasts but for all who need a well-illustrated and comprehensive academic reference to the Aloe genus.

Alpines, From mountain to garden is a refreshing new perspective on the many stunning plant species that make their home above the treeline. Where most guides to alpine plants have favored collecting and rare species, Richard Wilford offers a holistic approach that describes their discovery and introduction into cultivation and why these factors must be taken in to consideration when planting these mountain dwellers in your garden.

Organized geographically, Alpines, From mountain to garden covers the conditions—drainage, climate, light levels, temperature, and precipitation—and species native to each of nine regions, including the United States and Canada, South America, China, Europe, and Africa.  In all, over three hundred plants are described and prolifically illustrated. Additional chapters cover cultivation, conservation, and the impact of indiscriminate collecting on the many species that are now on the verge of extinction. With its wealth of insight into where alpine plants come from and how this affects their cultivation, this new book from Kew’s Botanical Magazine Monograph series is sure to be a hit with gardeners, collectors, travelers, and photographers alike.

American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century is the second of three authoritative volumes of garden history by Ann Leighton. This entertaining book focuses on eighteenth-century gardens and gardening. Leighton's material for the book was drawn from letters, journals, invoices, and books of men and women who were interested in the plants of the New and Old World. Throughout the book are illustrations and descriptive listings of native and new plants that were cultivated during the eighteenth century.

Companion volumes by Ann Leighton

Early American Gardens “For Meate or Medicine”
American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century “For Comfort and Affluence”

Tracing the roots of American botany through the journals of an eighteenth-century explorer.

Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.

Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, André Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785–1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux’s American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.

To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships—debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck—that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.
 

This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants—ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett’s 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett’s book so useful.

 Features include:
 *  coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families
 *  more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa
 *  keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations
 *  habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy
 *  a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds
 *  glossaries of botanical and habitat terms
 *  a full index for each volume

Wetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.

This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants—ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett’s 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett’s book so useful.

 Features include:
 *  coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families
 *  more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa
 *  keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations
 *  habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy
 *  a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds
 *  glossaries of botanical and habitat terms
 *  a full index for each volume

Wetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.

This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants—ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett’s 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett’s book so useful.

 Features include:
 *  coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families
 *  more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa
 *  keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations
 *  habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy
 *  a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds
 *  glossaries of botanical and habitat terms
 *  a full index for each volume

Wetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.

Drawing on a remarkable combination of early twentieth-century field notes, archaeological evidence, historical accounts, and the voices of Arikara collaborators, Arikara Agriculture: Mother Corn’s Gift to the Sahnish People offers a richly layered account of one of the Plains’ most accomplished agricultural societies. 

Living along the Missouri River in present-day North and South Dakota, the Sahnish (Arikara) people cultivated expansive fields of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and other crops, sustaining vibrant communities and extensive trade networks. At the heart of this remarkable book are the invaluable records of ethnobotanist Melvin Gilmore, who documented the knowledge of Arikara elders between 1916 and 1924, capturing a lifeway on the cusp of profound change.

More than a historical study, this volume foregrounds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance of agriculture in Sahnish life. The contributors discuss how corn was the center of the Arikaras’ world and how it, and other agricultural crops, were important not just as food but also for the culture. The book illuminates traditional horticultural methods, food preparation techniques, and the enduring relevance of these practices today. 

Both a vital contribution to ethnobiology and a community-centered preservation of knowledge, this work speaks to ongoing conversations about Indigenous foodways, resilience, and the revitalization of traditional ecological knowledge.

Supported with ample iconographic, ethnohistoric, etymological, and scientific evidence, Aztec Science is a groundbreaking endeavor introducing a new and radical approach to the study of Aztec art. It demonstrates that the Indigenous peoples of ancient Mesoamerica recorded scientific information about plants in their material culture. The detailed analysis of plant imagery in Aztec art, including in manuscripts such as the Codex Borgia, reveals that the cultural importance of maize and other plants was closely linked to scientific concepts that were well known in central Mexico centuries before they were subsequently “discovered” in Europe.

For the Nahua, Helen Burgos-Ellis argues, maize’s significance went far beyond economic value and religious importance. In Nahua art, references to maize, grass, and Quetzalcoatl reflect historic and scientifically relevant information. These images and glyphs, when studied against the ethnohistoric and scientific record of central Mexicans’ vast knowledge of plants, indicate that the Nahua understood key concepts about the maize plant, including its genetic origin from a common grass, pollination process, life cycle, and sexual reproduction. Consequently, the cultural significance of maize for the Nahuas was deeply intertwined with scientific understanding.

Aztec Science is a radical departure from bulk of the scholarship on the Codex Borgia, which has primarily been understood to contain calendrical and ritual information rather than botanical content, and is of significant interest to Pre-Columbianists and students and scholars of ethnohistory, Indigenous history and culture, traditional ecological knowledge, art history, and the history of science and botany.