Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast
Reviews (99)
Too expensive for the amount of information in the book.
I paid 25.00 for this paperback book by the time shipping was added. I bought it to identify the trees on my farm only to find that many trees have leaves that look alike, the leaves in this book were drawings many times and not actual photos. I did not know there were red, black, yellow, white and chestnut oak trees. They don't all have the same leaves or bark and many of their leaves and bark are similar to other trees. That leaves the reader to guesstimate which tree is which. There is no definitive answer for the reader. I have decided to check out these reference books at the library before I buy another one online to determine if the book is actually worth the price of adding to my library, many times, it is not.
Excellent field guide, with a novel approach
I have two filed guides to trees, one better than the other, but this one fills a big gap: how to classify bark and identify trees starting with the bark instead of the leaves. As the author points out, the bark is at eye level, while leaves at human height often are not typical beacuse of being shaded, confounding ID by the leaves. After carefully reading his first three chapters, on the structure of bark and how to recognize the different types, I feel reasonably confident about going out and using the guide. Note that he covers only trees commonly found in New England and eastern New York state, and this is not a guide to every species out there, but many of the species he covers are much more widespread. The photos show the primary keys from the inside front and back covers, and the first two pages of the detailed keys. Following those keys leads to pages describing each species in more detail.
really does work
In order for this book to be useful you need to read the first section on how to use the book. I did that and then went out in the neighborhood and quickly identified 2 different trees, by the bark only following the steps. I went a bit further and found a far more complex bark on several trees and had to go really far through the key to get to the type of tree. I did not believe that it was the species that the key concluded, and wasted time looking at the wrong pages, then picked up a leaf, bought it home and it was the tree that the keys took me to first. Lesson learned, follow the book. I am pretty happy with this book !
Might be the best book on trees I’ve ever read.
I live in the Midwest and this book covers the Northeast. Most of the trees in the book are also found in my area. This book had so much detail and explanation. This is not a guide that you need to take with you on each outing (unless of course you want to). This book teaches you how to identify trees. Once you understand the system and bark descriptors you can apply this to trees anywhere. The only thing that would make this book better is more trees! Would love to see a version specific to Midwest. I have no buyer’s remorse on this one.
A reasonably good starting book that could be greatly improved upon
A fair book on identification but needs more identifying characteristics, Needs more and larger pics perhaps with little arrows pointing to very definitive markers and also how some of these could be confused with other trees and how to rule out one from another. Exact and clear pics of twigs and leaf buds would also greatly help.on the facing page. A reasonably good starting book that could be greatly improved upon.
easy to identify trees
Moved to a cabin in the woods on acrage with many trees and we wanted to identify what we had on our property. This is a great book to stroll with to identify the many trees that are out there. The photos are clear and help with identifying bark pretty easily. We have made notes where we found the trees on the pages and it seems to help when you come across a familiar bark. Great for walks or hikes in the park forest areas too. It's well written and the photography is excellent. There is good information with each entry and is learning experience. Highly recommend if you have children as so they can research and learn about the many trees that abound in your neighborhood and forests.
This book is working well in the Midwest / Ohio area
I spend a lot of time in the woods around my home in Ohio. The forests on my parent's property in central Ohio (NW Coshocton County) are mostly native trees, with a few random pines and the occasional fruit tree. In the fall I spend several days sitting in the middle of the woods in a tree stand, holding as still as possible while waiting for a white-tail deer to wander into the range of my muzzle-loader rifle. While spending my time up in the trees I love to try to identify the timber that surrounds me, as well as the birds and wildlife. My parents and their parents have sold timber off the farm as if it were just another cash crop so I grew up looking for the long straight trunk of hardwoods that indicated value in the lumber mill. My Grandpa's favorite wood was the black walnut, and my dad's favorite is the now extinct* American chestnut. My mom favors the wild cherry with its red grain and light sap wood and my younger sister is the curly maple fan. I can spot a potential curly maple (looking for an older maple that edges the fields and has an uneven canopy), I can easily spot the wild cherry trees, beech and sycamores but without leaves I couldn't tell the sassafras from the walnut, nor the various 0aks and I can mix up tulip poplar with maple... My dad's extra years in the woods has allowed him to recognize a tree by the bark and the way the tree grows, it's branches reaching up to the sun or growing straight away from the trunk. Most of this is unconscious and he'll struggle to explain how he knows one tree from the other. This book, while targeted for the New England states, seems to share most of the trees we have in our hardwood forests. We don't have most of the birch trees, and only a few native conifers but overall it's been very helpful. I will take a little time one of these days and jot down and indication of whether or not the different species are supposed to grow in Ohio and fold a map of the farm inside with marks for various groups of trees. What's cool is that after only a few quick reads through the book, I can talk with my 75 year old dad, and discuss the quality of the black walnuts growing down along Earl, or the Beeches that have been blowing down on the East side of Turkey ridge. As we walk along the field above the barn, I can ask if those 18" diameter sassafras trees shouldn't be harvested for firewood to allow more light in for the shell bark hickories? My parents had different goals for the woods than my sisters and I - but all of us appreciate both the value of the woods as an ecosystem, and the potential dollars for standing lumber in the forests. We weight the opportunities to have the now grown over upper pasture cleared for "chipping", losing all the crabapples that feed so much of the wildlife, with the potential funds we could get to pay for a new roof on the house. I look at the black locust trees that are almost 3' in diameter and visualize the beautiful hardwood floors in the cabin I want to build while noting the young cherry trees that will receive the better light to allow them to fill in the canopy and create more fruit for the turkeys and birds. After spending most of this past weekend trying to puzzle out the tree my deer stand was in, as well as the young trees growing around it (Tulip Poplar and dogwoods) I was anxious to get home and dig into this book yet again. Now I'm planning a trip to the back woodlot on my own property to see just what I have back long my creek and if there are some trees that need removed to allow food producing nut or fruit trees to come in and help feed our livestock (chickens and goats) as well as the wildlife in our far more urban Northeast Ohio home.
Beautifully produced, helpful explanations
Bark is the only feature I can access on many tall forest trees (even in summer, where distance and canopy overlap make even binoculars and fallen nut observations less than entirely helpful). The schematic feature sketches and diagrams in key of this book ("decision tree" for identification) combine with very well produced young-mature-old (plus variations) photos under each tree's dedicated page-spread. Tom Wessel's seal of approval (Wojtech is his former student) gives me great confidence that this is meticulously accurate -- at least for the NewEngland (plus east-upstate NY) area covered. Clearly, too, the book is intended not just to help readers identify tree species by name, but to appreciate what the bark of trees can show us about their history and ecological relations.
Highly recommend but with a proviso
Bark alone simply does not give enough info to reliably identify most unknown deciduous trees in winter. But this book is a terrific aid for overall tree identification and has helped me identify many unknown trees. With the help of a leaf sample you can very accurately ID most trees that grow in the NE. Also, this book makes you look closely at bark and notice how details differ during the life-span of trees. I hope the author will write another book on tree bark, expanding the geographical range of trees covered a bit more.
An underappreciated part of the tree
I was really excited to see this book, and I think it's great to see that someone has covered tree bark in this level of detail. It is ironic that most tree field guides focus on buds, twigs, flowers, and leaves; yet almost all tree recognition in the field is done on the basis of bark and shape, and nothing else. This book helps us understand why this is so. It is hard to find specific, concrete, easily describable, or "keyable" characteristics for bark. Bark is essentially a texture, and textures are hard to describe. Or perhaps, such descriptions are hard to assimilate. The author has done a great job--indeed, I don't think I've seen bark texture and pattern ever described in greater detail, or in more concrete terms, than in this book. Despite this, bark alone remains a difficult way to IDENTIFY a tree. Once you have identified a tree many times and have taken the time to become familiar with the bark, however, you will find bark to be the most useful feature for RECOGNIZING a tree. A similar pattern holds true for herbaceous plants, too. We learn them by such details as their leaf shape and arrangement, stem cross-section, flower structure and cluster arrangement; but once familiar, we recognize them foremost by their shape and leaf and stem texture. It's almost as if texture, whether of bark or leaves, is too complex for the conscious, logical mind to readily process, but just right for the subconscious process of pattern recognition or "search image." The reason I only gave four stars is because, as much as I like the book's concept, I don't think it quite accomplished its goal. I can recognize all of the trees in the book at a glance by bark, but I don't know if I could do it with some of them, starting over as a novice, using the book. I'm not sure if that's a failure in the book, or because it is just inherently difficult. I can see a few ways that the book might be able to work better for its intended purpose, though. Pattern recognition is dependent on seeing a pattern multiple times, and I often felt like the book didn't show us enough. The author could have used a wider angle lens to get longer sections of trunk in each shot, preferably using highest depth-of-field settings, and have more photos the full length of the page, so we could see the pattern over a longer section of bark. This would imitate real life better, as in nature we don't see trees as rectangular blocks of bark. There are also several trees for which the photos did not seem to show enough of the common range of variability. All told, however, I'm glad I got the book and enjoy the closer look I've been taking at tree bark since. It helped me put words to patterns that I was seeing and not thinking about. The classification system for bark types is useful, and I really enjoyed the discussion of bark physiology, growth, and anatomy. If you are learning trees, this book will definitely be helpful. You will be able to identify many trees by the bark alone with this field guide, even if you are occasionally left "stumped." What I'd like to see? A detailed tree book that included this kind of depth about bark alongside the normal identifying characteristics. That would be super.
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