A Book of Wildflowers

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

It is surprising to find this little book of 55 pretty watercolours, with accompanying snippets of scientific information and snatches of plant lore, authored by William Niering. His previous, more serious, works have included the Eastern Region’s Audubon Field Guide to North American Wildflowers, numerous articles on wildflowers, and several bulletins on naturalistic landscaping for Connecticut College, where he is Professor of Botany and has directed the Arboretum. The present work would serve neither as a field guide nor as a home reference work. Its main attributes are that it is small (16 cm x 11 cm) and attractive, but toward what end?

Niering explains in an Introduction that these 55 species are mainly Old World plants introduced accidentally to North America but now common here. Most are what we call weeds, and yet they are beautiful and interesting enough to merit the close look the text and illustrations encourage, but do not satisfactorily provide.

Readers not already familiar with the plants would have trouble finding most in the field because — with a few exceptions — no indication is given of size or overall plant habit. The illustration of the habit of Cornus, bunchberry, is very misleading, as are many of the flowers’ colours.

A “Wildflower Glossary” explains 65 botanical terms used in the text. A four-page section called “Wildflowers in the Garden” calls attention to the naturalistic landscaping potential of 19 of the species. Yet the book has no index, cross-referenced or otherwise, and the table of contents and alphabetical arrangement of the book are by genus, seldom the name familiar to average readers.