Book review: California Desert Plants
Every now and then a book comes along that is a complete game changer. California Desert Plants (ISBN 978-1-941624-14-2) is one of them. Written by Phil Rundel, Robert Gustafson, and Michael Kaufmann and published just a few weeks ago by Backcountry Press , a small independent publisher in Northern California, it covers the tremendous diversity of plants in the three deserts that extend into California: the Great Basin, the Mojave, and the Sonoran (the California portion of the Sonoran is often referred to as the Colorado Desert, after the Colorado River). Of course there are other books on California desert flora, especially wildflowers. However, they're often organized by flower color (like Introduction to California Desert Wildflowers ), which makes it difficult to grasp the bigger picture. California Desert Plants takes a different approach, focusing on desert plants within distinct ecological communities. As a result, plants that live together are described together. “In this...