I find field guides fascinating and always enjoy reading new ones. “Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains” by Daniel Mathews is something of a hybrid between a traditional field guide, and a collection of natural history essays. There are enough photos and text descriptions to help you recognize the most common plants, animals, bugs, and even the rocks of our mountains.
While field guides with detailed keys or multiple photographs for each species might be better for fine-tuning your plant identification, this is handy if your specimen is occupied by some winged creature – just flip to another part of the book to identify it, too. Interspersed are anecdotes and observations of the more noteworthy genera that make this a delightful book to read from cover to cover.
This isn’t exactly a new field guide. Mathews describes it as “essentially an expanded and updated third edition of “Cascade-Olympic Natural History,” the second edition under that earlier title was published in 1999. However, it is new to me and I found it quite interesting. Unlike some other all-in-one field guides, plants are not short-changed and – if you include mosses, fungi, and lichens – comprise half of the book.
The essays on the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers are delightful. For example, the glacier (Erythronium grandiflorum) and avalanche (E. montanum) lilies “…seem ideal vehicles for those anthropomorphic virtues we love to foist on mountain wildflowers—innocence, bravery, simplicity, perseverance, patient suffering, and so on. They toil not, neither do they spin, and they don’t taste half bad either.”
Excerpted from the Summer 2017 Arboretum Bulletin.