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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.

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. 

When workmen excavating the ruins of Pompeii eagerly gathered the native medicinal plants growing there, Wilhelmina Jashemski discovered that this was another example of the continuity of life in the shadow of Vesuvius. Many of the plants used for herbal medicine around Pompeii today are the same ones that ancient authorities such as Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides recommended for treating the same types of disorders.

In this book, Jashemski presents an herbal of thirty-six medicinal plants, most of them known to the ancients and still employed today. She describes each plant's contemporary medicinal uses and compares them to ancient practices as recorded in literary sources. Scientific, English, and Italian names and the plant's mythological associations complete the entries, while elegant, full-page portraits depict each plant visually.

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.
 

A growing interest in all things Maya brings an increasing number of visitors to prehistoric Maya ruins and contemporary Maya communities in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the southern areas of Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. For these visitors and indeed everyone with an interest in the Maya, this field guide highlights nearly 100 species of plants and animals that were significant to the ancient Maya and that continue to inhabit the Maya region today.

Drawing from the disciplines of biology, ecology, and anthropology, Victoria Schlesinger describes each plant or animal's habitat and natural history, identifying characteristics (also shown in a black-and-white drawing), and cultural significance to the ancient and contemporary Maya. An introductory section explains how to use the book and offers a concise overview of the history, lifeways, and cosmology of the ancient Maya. The concluding section describes the collapse of ancient Maya society and briefly traces the history of the Maya region from colonial times to the present.

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.