An excellent field guide to local trees, with lots of photos. It’s very fun to recognize the streets and parks as you flip through the book. Includes tree maps of historic sites, a terrific list of places to view trees, and an interesting essay about Philly’s botanical history.

Like finding a long lost treasure map. This is a 22-page typewritten list of notable trees in the Philly area, bound by three of the oldest staples I own. The list begins with Abies cephalonica - Greek fir - at “old neglected estate, Old York Road and County Line, Warminster, Montg. County” and ends with Zelkova serrata at Morris Arboretum. A wonder of a book.

Best of its kind. Photo after photo, you will recognize many of the weeds, sprouts, grasses, and vines growing in their natural habitats of sidewalk cracks, alleyways, gutters, parking lots, and fences. Extremely informative, you can learn a lot digging into this book. The chapter on grasses is insane, a level of identification I go nowhere near. The author is a Harvard University Landscape Architect professor.

The author’s experience of tracking a pair of falcons around the treetops of his English countryside town. In real life, he did this for ten years but for the book he condenses it into one 6-month period in the early sixties. It’s written like field notes that turn into a personal diary. About 190 pages of stunning prose, a big influence on many chapters of my field guide.