Newcomb's

A few weeks ago, a friend contacted me to ask for my plant field guide recommendations. He is a well versed field biologist, but has always chased after the creatures that move and he thought it was about time he paid some attention to the plants. I sent him a list of my favourite books and told him that the first one he should find is Newcomb's Wildflower Guide written by Lawrence Newcomb and illustrated by Gordon Morrison.

Newcomb's, for short, was one of the first field guides I discovered and has been a constant throughout my education and career. The first edition, originally printed in 1977, has a distinct bright yellow cover. It always cheers me up and it's so easy to find on my bookshelf or wherever I've set it down in a tallgrass prairie. It's compact enough to carry around anywhere, within the northeastern States and neighbouring Canada of course, but it contains the most information about the widest variety of plants that I have found in a field guide. The illustrations are detailed and clear. And, one of my favourite features of this guide is that the pictures are found on the page directly facing the plant description. In the field, it is much easier to confirm identification when one can read the plant description and view the illustration at the same time.

This field guide is described as, "an ingenious new key system for quick, positive field identification of wildflowers, flowering shrubs, and vines." Before using the traditional dichotomous key to determine the identification of a plant down to species, the reader uses a chart called The Three Classifications to narrow down the choices. This chart asks the user to answer the same three questions about each plant they want to identify. First, what is the flower type? Second, what is the plant type? And third, what is the leaf type? Each of the three questions have a short set of 4 to 8 possible answers that are fairly easy to decide between. For each of the answers to the three questions, the associated number is selected. The resulting 3 digit code number is used to find the starting point in the dichotomous key.

On August 3, I was out for a hike with some local naturalists at the Altona Forest in Pickering. The topic of the guided hike was the Understory Plants of Altona Forest. One of the hike leaders and I were both carrying Newcomb's that day. I have a couple copies that I have picked up or have been gifted along the way. I share them with friends and keep a copy on each of my desks. They are all in fairly good condition with a few bent corners, maybe some dried plant samples tucked inside, and a few scribbled notes in the margins. The leader's copy, I'm certain, had been at his side every day since 1977. From the cover, his copy was unidentifiable as Newcomb's, let alone as a book. It was completely held together with packing tape that had  melded tiny fragments of the forest into every tear and crease. The bright yellow colour was completely gone and it just sort of looked like a puffed-up grey mass of papers. Inside, a note was taped on every page. Every single centimetre of white space was filled with handwritten notes in tiny, shaky script that was only legible to the author. There was a thick rubber band holding the whole thing together. He let me hold it and carefully open it up. I was worried that the notes were going to blow away in the wind. Or that his most prized possession was going to disintegrate in my hands. I guess this is something to aspire to, but I think I would miss the bright yellow cover far too much.