We split the bibliography into several major groups by plant types. Each group lists titles ordered alphabetically, by principal author.

Wildflowers (Herbaceous Plants)

Loosely speaking, plants that regrow from the ground each year, either from seed or from roots persisting from previous years, are herbaceous plants, and are listed here. Most wildflowers are herbaceous plants.

Aquatic Plants

This list includes books on true aquatic plants, such as seaweeds, as well as surface-dwelling plants, plants that grow in shallow water, and plants that are most often found in or at the boundaries of wetlands.

Ferns and Fern Relatives

This list encompasses true ferns, succulent ferns, and fern relatives, such as horsetails, clubmosses, firmosses, ground cedars, quillworts, and spikemosses.

Mushrooms and Other Fungi

This bibliography covers fungi—mushrooms, “toadstools,” puffballs, gel fungi, stinkhorns, and slime molds.

Grasses, Sedges, and Rushes

Grasses include most of the grains we eat, and most of the grasslike plants in lawns, meadows and wild areas everywhere. Large grasses are rushes. This list also includes sedges, plants with grasslike leaves but unusual yellowish, greenish, or brown spiky flowers. Many sedges are found in wet areas. Finally, bamboos are grasses.

Lichens

Lichens attach themselves to rocks or trees and shrubs, or grow on the ground. They may be crustose—looking almost like they are painted on a rock or bark; or foliose—resembling tiny leafy shrubs; or fruticose—bushy or shrubby growths that sometimes resemble elfin forests of antlers. They may hang like witch’s hair across branches.

Mosses

If you had no circulatory system to carry food and oxygen around your body, you’d be as small as a bug. That’s why mosses are tiny. In plants, the “circulatory system” is called the vascular system, and mosses never evolved such a system. Nevertheless, these miniature forests are well adapted to habitats all over the world.

Arid Climate Plants

Succulents—plants that store extra water in their leaves or stems to survive in dry climates—are covered in this bibliography. These plants include cacti, aloes, agaves, and many euphorbias. Many general purpose books also cover arid climate plants, so check the other bibliographies too.

Trees and Shrubs (Woody Plants)

Loosely speaking, plants that regrow from the ground each year are herbaceous plants, and are listed in the wildflowers bibliography. This bibliography covers trees and shrubs—plants that persist from year to year, and having woody stems or trunks.

Miscellaneous Books

This bibliography includes books on botany, nomenclature, botanical Latin, medicinal, edible or psychoactive plants, etc.

If you cannot tell the type of a plant you have seen, consider the following:

• If it looks like something the dog threw up, it is probably a slime mold—see the mushrooms bibliography.
• If it looks like a plant, but it isn’t green, it might be a plant that gets its energy by preying on other plants, so it doesn’t need chlorophyll. Examples include indian pipes (Monotropa) and broomrape. See the wildflowers bibliography.
• If it looks like a miniature pine tree, it could be a ground cedar, ground pine, or club moss—see the ferns bibliography.
• Those ear-shaped masses often seen on the sides of trees or deadwood are bracket fungi (mushrooms bibliography).
• Colorful, often translucent slimy or jelly-like protrusions from wood are also fungi (mushrooms bibliography).
• Grasslike plants with spiky yellowish, greenish or brown ”flowers” may be sedges (grasses bibliography).
• Plants you would swear are cacti—they look identical to cacti—may be members of the complex genus Euphorbia (wildflowers and/or arid climate plants bibliographies).
• Long tubes with large grass-like leaves and fuzzy tops are rushes. So is bamboo. (Grasses bibliography).

Gardening

Books about landscaping, outdoor gardening, and indoor plants.