Bark: A Field Guide to Trees of the Northeast Paperback – April 12, 2011

This book uses bark instead of leaves (obviously) to help you identify trees and it has been much easier this way. Especially since their flowchart is also fairly easy to use. While it may not always lead to what i think is definitely the right answer, I at least get very close. Like what species of tree it is. Plus I recommend actually being in front of the tree you want to identify since sometimes they wanna know the color of the bark on top and bottom or what color it is under the bark. And yes they do show how the leaves should look like too. Highly recommend it!

I hike all year. In most seasons I can tell which tree is which by looking at the leaves. But there are no leaves to look at on deciduous trees in winter. This guide book methodically teaches about tree bark and presents a method to identify each tree just from seeing its bark. It’s just the book I was looking for!

I gave to my husband who is always wondering what kind of trees we come across when we hike. He would take a photo of the characteristics of the tree on his phone and find out as soon as he gets home. It is a new way of figuring out and understanding the tree population in our Northeastern state area.

I spend a lot of time in the woods around my home in Ohio. The forests on my parent's property in central Ohio (NW Coshocton County) are mostly native trees, with a few random pines and the occasional fruit tree. In the fall I spend several days sitting in the middle of the woods in a tree stand, holding as still as possible while waiting for a white-tail deer to wander into the range of my muzzle-loader rifle. While spending my time up in the trees I love to try to identify the timber that surrounds me, as well as the birds and wildlife. My parents and their parents have sold timber off the farm as if it were just another cash crop so I grew up looking for the long straight trunk of hardwoods that indicated value in the lumber mill. My Grandpa's favorite wood was the black walnut, and my dad's favorite is the now extinct* American chestnut. My mom favors the wild cherry with its red grain and light sap wood and my younger sister is the curly maple fan. I can spot a potential curly maple (looking for an older maple that edges the fields and has an uneven canopy), I can easily spot the wild cherry trees, beech and sycamores but without leaves I couldn't tell the sassafras from the walnut, nor the various 0aks and I can mix up tulip poplar with maple... My dad's extra years in the woods has allowed him to recognize a tree by the bark and the way the tree grows, it's branches reaching up to the sun or growing straight away from the trunk. Most of this is unconscious and he'll struggle to explain how he knows one tree from the other.This book, while targeted for the New England states, seems to share most of the trees we have in our hardwood forests. We don't have most of the birch trees, and only a few native conifers but overall it's been very helpful. I will take a little time one of these days and jot down and indication of whether or not the different species are supposed to grow in Ohio and fold a map of the farm inside with marks for various groups of trees.What's cool is that after only a few quick reads through the book, I can talk with my 75 year old dad, and discuss the quality of the black walnuts growing down along Earl, or the Beeches that have been blowing down on the East side of Turkey ridge. As we walk along the field above the barn, I can ask if those 18" diameter sassafras trees shouldn't be harvested for firewood to allow more light in for the shell bark hickories? My parents had different goals for the woods than my sisters and I - but all of us appreciate both the value of the woods as an ecosystem, and the potential dollars for standing lumber in the forests. We weight the opportunities to have the now grown over upper pasture cleared for "chipping", losing all the crabapples that feed so much of the wildlife, with the potential funds we could get to pay for a new roof on the house. I look at the black locust trees that are almost 3' in diameter and visualize the beautiful hardwood floors in the cabin I want to build while noting the young cherry trees that will receive the better light to allow them to fill in the canopy and create more fruit for the turkeys and birds. After spending most of this past weekend trying to puzzle out the tree my deer stand was in, as well as the young trees growing around it (Tulip Poplar and dogwoods) I was anxious to get home and dig into this book yet again. Now I'm planning a trip to the back woodlot on my own property to see just what I have back long my creek and if there are some trees that need removed to allow food producing nut or fruit trees to come in and help feed our livestock (chickens and goats) as well as the wildlife in our far more urban Northeast Ohio home.

I was really excited to see this book, and I think it's great to see that someone has covered tree bark in this level of detail. It is ironic that most tree field guides focus on buds, twigs, flowers, and leaves; yet almost all tree recognition in the field is done on the basis of bark and shape, and nothing else. This book helps us understand why this is so. It is hard to find specific, concrete, easily describable, or "keyable" characteristics for bark. Bark is essentially a texture, and textures are hard to describe. Or perhaps, such descriptions are hard to assimilate. The author has done a great job--indeed, I don't think I've seen bark texture and pattern ever described in greater detail, or in more concrete terms, than in this book. Despite this, bark alone remains a difficult way to IDENTIFY a tree. Once you have identified a tree many times and have taken the time to become familiar with the bark, however, you will find bark to be the most useful feature for RECOGNIZING a tree. A similar pattern holds true for herbaceous plants, too. We learn them by such details as their leaf shape and arrangement, stem cross-section, flower structure and cluster arrangement; but once familiar, we recognize them foremost by their shape and leaf and stem texture. It's almost as if texture, whether of bark or leaves, is too complex for the conscious, logical mind to readily process, but just right for the subconscious process of pattern recognition or "search image."The reason I only gave four stars is because, as much as I like the book's concept, I don't think it quite accomplished its goal. I can recognize all of the trees in the book at a glance by bark, but I don't know if I could do it with some of them, starting over as a novice, using the book. I'm not sure if that's a failure in the book, or because it is just inherently difficult. I can see a few ways that the book might be able to work better for its intended purpose, though. Pattern recognition is dependent on seeing a pattern multiple times, and I often felt like the book didn't show us enough. The author could have used a wider angle lens to get longer sections of trunk in each shot, preferably using highest depth-of-field settings, and have more photos the full length of the page, so we could see the pattern over a longer section of bark. This would imitate real life better, as in nature we don't see trees as rectangular blocks of bark. There are also several trees for which the photos did not seem to show enough of the common range of variability.All told, however, I'm glad I got the book and enjoy the closer look I've been taking at tree bark since. It helped me put words to patterns that I was seeing and not thinking about. The classification system for bark types is useful, and I really enjoyed the discussion of bark physiology, growth, and anatomy. If you are learning trees, this book will definitely be helpful. You will be able to identify many trees by the bark alone with this field guide, even if you are occasionally left "stumped."What I'd like to see? A detailed tree book that included this kind of depth about bark alongside the normal identifying characteristics. That would be super.

Who knew that you could create a field guide for identifying trees by their bark that even a lay person could use? The first 5 chapters of the book (86 pages worth) include: How to use this book; Bark Structure; Bark Types;Secondary Identification Keys (for when the bark doesn't tell the whole story); and a chapter on Bark Ecology. The next 160 pages or so cover the main trees of northeastern North America, with excellent photos of bark at multiple stages of maturity - all with the ubiquitous quarter placed on the tree for scale (for bark ridges, plates, etc.). Each tree description includes a silhouette of the leaf, the branching pattern of the tree, and a range map (unfortunately it only covers the US states and, as with so many American books, does not acknowledge that we share many of the same plants here in Canada!).If you already have a number of field guides to trees, this would make a great addition. However, it is for the more "serious" naturalist - it would not be a good first text on tree identification.

Great book. Well written with good pictures. Nice to find something different from the usual tree guide.

too brief of explanations of the trees. i always appreciate a little more about habitat, ecological function, lore, etc.

I've been wanting this book for so long! Great book!