I have an extensive collection of books on native plants - and the plants
to go with them! This book is one of my least favorite. The information is
not well sorted or presented. I would recommend C. Colston Burrell's
"Encyclopedia of Wildflowers" in preference to this book.
Or Carole Otteson's "Native Plant Primer" with trees and shrubs in addition to
herbaceous perennials.

This is one of the better books when it comes to information about growing native plants. The authors are not shy about their opinions and the book is better for it.

On the down side, the book is not nearly as exhaustive as Cullina's books. I also don't like that it puts the photographs apart from the text, as this makes for some annoying page-flipping. The quality of the photographs is also rather amateurish.

A tepid recommendation would be a hearty one with a better layout and improved pictures.

I never thought I would take a gardening book to bed with me. This one is a pleasure to read and taught me a lot about identification and gardening uses of native wildflowers of the southeast and northeast. It's the first book I grab to look up a species. Lots of full color photographs have made it much easier for me to identify the plants I want at the nursery. The two authors are coming from different perspectives - one has a natural meadow/woodlands landscape and the other uses native plants in a more controlled garden setting along with exotics. Between the two of them, the reader gets a balanced idea of the possibilities of introducing native flowers to their own yards. I only wish the index combined scientific names with common names, rather than having two separate indexes. It would also be convenient if the plant photos were on the same pages as the descriptions. But those are minor criticisms of an overall superb book.

I bought this hoping that I would be able to easily identify the native shrubs and vines on my property, but it is not very helpful. It is very difficult to use for someone not trained in botany. I should know, as my training is in aquatic biology and zoology. Even with my biology background, I have not found it very useful so the identification part of the title is very misleading. Also, there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to how the plants are categorized. I was hoping this would be more like Taylor's guides to trees, shrubs, etc. with pictures that then refer to a description, but it wasn't.

I bought this book because I adore "Gardening with Native Wildflowers" by the same authors. I was a little disappointed because this one is not as reader friendly for beginners such as myself. It does fill an important niche by identifying all native shrubs and woody vines of the southeast, as the title implies, and for this I imagine it would be a must for anyone compiling a serious library and/or study on the subject of native plants. The book is chock full of color photographs, each of which is labeled by the scientific name of the plant. However, I would have liked to see the common name there also (there is a common name index). A beginner who does not need to know about or identify a wide variety of shrubs and vines might be better off starting with a general guide to natural gardening that includes a variety of plant types.