Brenda Chambers, Karen Legasy and Cathy V. Bentley. Forest Plants of Central Ontario. Lone Pine. 1996.

Lone Pine Publishing has produced yet another outstanding field guide to plants from specific habitats. Forest Plants of Central Ontario covers a very limited geographical region which is borders on the northern edge of Lakes Superior and Hudson. The excellent introduction discusses the various microhabitats and provides charts showing temperature ranges and precipitation amounts before the growing season starts.

I like the organization of the book. All plants are grouped by form: trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, sedges and rushes, ferns and allies, mosses and liverworts, and lichens. I went through several of these divisions trying to discover the method for organizing the plants within each section. I could not discover the system. Each description provides the common name in French and English, the Latin name, and the family group. I expected to see the groups organized alphabetically by either the common name, Latin name or the family group. Frankly, I never figured out the system. The tree section, for example starts with the pine family.

In my opinion, this book would be easier to use if one of the names was chosen to use for alphabetizing the descriptions. As it is, it is a guessing game as to where you will find the description for a particular plant even if you know one or more of its names. Each description gives a general statement about the plant, and then detailed descriptions of the leaves, flowers, fruits, habitat, special notes, and whether the plant is used for food by various animals. Each description contains at least one colored photograph and a black and white line drawing illustrating the plant.

This is another field guide to add to your backpack if you live in the Central Ontario region. With the exception of my comments about the arrangement of plant descriptions within the general groups, I found this book easy to use.