A who’s-who photo album of all the little sprouts, seedlings, grass stalks, vines, thistles, and ferns that grow in the crooks and nannies of a city’s infrastructure. There’s a section on weed trees too.

It’s a Herculean task for any nature writer, to identify and describe the random citizenry of spontaneous urban vegetation, but the results are outstanding. It’s a terrific book, well worth having in your library, although not for the novice. A basic understanding of the parts of a plant and how traditional field guides are divided is a good prerequisite before using this guide. For example, this book divides the weeds into sections on Ferns, Horsetails, Conifers, Woody Dicots, and Monocots which are grasses.

Ever wanted to know how to tell grasses apart? No? Then this field guide is not for you.

But have you ever wondered if anybody knows the names to all the little clumps of plants growing out of the cement and the potholes? Ever wonder if you can go beyond just dandelions and purslane? If so then you’re going to really dig this book.

I know I certainly do. I love seeing these familiar weeds in their flowering and fruiting stages, something I never take the time to notice when I’m out and about. I can’t say I remember much after every browsing. The names of the plants very rarely stick to my memory but they’re a hoot every time I pick up the book again: quackgrass, buckthorn, carpenter’s weed, creeping buttercup, downey brome.

According to the preface, this was a grad school project for a landscape architect class. They came up with the idea on a field trip to Spectacle Island, “a capped landfill in the middle of Boston Harbor.”