Botanica North America: The Illustrated Guide to Our Native Plants, Their Botany, History, and the Way They Have Shaped Our World

Pleasance Crawford is the co-author of The Canadian Landscape and Garden
History Directory and Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden
Writing.

This fascinating exploration of North America through its most important
indigenous plants is an ambitious new departure for seasoned garden
writer Marjorie Harris. Surely the encyclopedic work, nearly 700 pages
long, would have been much more than five years in the making without
the large team of researchers, editorial assistants, plant experts, and
others whose help she readily acknowledges. Although they acknowledge
that natural boundaries are difficult to define or draw on a map, Harris
and her team divide the continent into 10 major plant regions: “The
Eastern Forests,” “Swamps and Wetlands,” “Florida,” “The
Boreal Forest,” “The Prairie,” “The Desert,” “California,”
“Montane,” “The Pacific Northwest,” and “The Tundra.” The
section on each region begins with an essay on its patterns of human
interaction and their short- and long-term effects on the balance of
nature. Then, within each region, the species—organized by botanical
family—appear generally in order of size and importance within the
community. Thus the first entries are usually on canopy trees, the next
on understorey members, and the last on herb-layer components.

In all, there are more than 420 entries—each detailing both the
plant’s botanical characteristics and its history of use by Aboriginal
North Americans and settlers. Quotes and anecdotes, collected from a
variety of sources and carefully documented in the endnotes, enliven
many of the entries. Colour photographs help describe some, but by no
means all, of the plants. An extensive bibliography and a nominal index
of plants conclude the work.

Botanica North America’s recurrent message is that in order to
survive, we must care not only about individual plants but also about
the ecosystems to which they, and we, belong. Its organization makes it
ideal for sampling a little at a time.