Field Guides For Sale

 Do you get confused as to which Hellebore is which? Can't remember which is the green-flowered one? Which, of the five types commonly found in gardens and hedgerows, are the poisonous ones?

What about dear little Snowdrops? There are only four types commonly found while out and about: 
three have broad leaves, one has narrow. Three have glossy leaves, one has matte leaves. Two have applanate leaves – that is, held like praying hands, palm to palm. The other two have convolute leaves, where they wrap around each other. It's not rocket science, but who can possibly remember all that? On top of all the other sets of differences, for all the other plants and trees? But a simple Table of Differences (or "Crib" as I call them) can list out these options in an easy-to-read layout, which is quick to check.

For the last couple of years I've been compiling these Tables of Difference for various groups of plants and trees, to make it easier to identify the common ones. Botany is not hard to get into, you quickly learn to recognise, say, a Willowherb.  The trick is in identifying which Willowherb it is.

This is where these little Field Guides come in: once you are confident enough to recognise that it's a  Willowherb, or a Speedwell, or a Veronica, you can save time wading through the in-depth botanical descriptions in Rose, Poland, Stace etc, and merely take a quick look at the relevant Field Guide, which has all the salient information neatly laid out in a grid, so you can quickly and easily check which characteristics your plant has.

Originally I made them just for myself, but the other members of the Midweek Botany Crew kept trying to steal them, and Steph suggested that I should sell them: and frankly, having put so much work into them, it seems a shame not to share them, and I'm a great believer in spreading the knowledge around.

Where can you get these miraculous works?  They are now available on Amazon Kindle as eBooks, free to download if you belong to Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime.

Here's the link to my Author Page, which is constantly updated as I publish new books: "Redwoods" went live a day or two ago - that's 25 books and counting!

For the benefit of those without Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimite, each month, for the first weekend of the month, there will be Field Guides offered for FREE download - Amazon restrict me as to how many "free" days each book is allowed to have, but I'll try to rotate the titles on offer, so you have a good chance of getting whichever ones you want for free. If there's one you particularly want, drop me an email and I'll put it at the top of the list.

At present they are only available electronically, and are published via Amazon's Kindle, but you can also download them to your PC or to other ebook readers, so it doesn't matter if you don't have a Kindle. Amazon kindly provide a free "app"  to allow you to download them, just click on the link next to the book of your choice.

I hope you enjoy them!