A New Plant Book

Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide by Peter Del Tredici, 2010. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. xviii, 374 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8014-7458-3. $29.95.

A few years ago I got myself a copy of Weeds of the Northeast by Richard H. Uva, Joseph C. Neal and Joseph M. DiTomaso (1997, Cornell University Press), which has proved to be enormously helpful in my explorations of the plant life of the urban environment. This new book by Peter Del Tredici is almost a companion volume to the previous publication, which is probably not accidental as they are both from Cornell University Press. The one by Uva et. al. is the more technical of the two books, with excellent keys, details of diagnostic features and close up photographs (including those of seeds). The new book by Del Tredici is lighter on technical details but has more photographs of plants in their urban habitat. The plants covered are those found growing wild in the built environment and the author treats them as the natural flora of this habitat, rather than as 'weeds' or 'invasives.' Coverage of species in the two books is most similar for the herbaceous plants while the new book includes more woody species. One major shortcoming of the new book is the inadequate treatment of similar and confusable species. For example, two common species of woodsorrels (Oxalis) with yellow flowers occur in urban habitats, yet only one of these is dealt with in this book. While Yellow Woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta) is certainly the more frequent of the two species and is treated adequately in the book there is no mention at all of Creeping Woodsorrel (Oxalis corniculata). (Both species are growing luxuriantly at this moment in the mulched flowerbeds at the front of our house here in Marine Park, Brooklyn.) Several species that deserve to be treated separately are instead briefly described under similar or related plants, e,g. Field Pennycress Thlaspi arvense (under Virginia Pepperweed Lepidium virginicum), Oldfield Toadflax Nuttallanthus canadensis (under Yellow Toadflax Linaria vulgaris). Del Tredici's book would definitely have benefited from more careful editing to eliminate certain inconsistencies. For example, in the text Erigeron annuus is referred to as Annual Fleabane but all of the photo captions use the alternative name Daisy Fleabane. Two particularly useful features of the book are the introduction and bibliography. The introduction has an interesting discussion of spontaneous urban plants with the attributes that make them particularly successful in this environment and a 'generalized taxonomy' of urban landscapes in the Northeast. The bibliography is an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to delve deeper not only into the subject of the Northeastern urban flora but the topic of urban ecology in general. In spite of some criticisms (particularly in regard to the coverage of certain confusable species) I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to all urban naturalists of the Northeast. (Many thanks to H for a copy the book reviewed here and to D for a copy of Blogging for Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley, which gave me a reason (or excuse!) to start this blog.)