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About the author


Tom is a talented artist that made a career in drafting and design.
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Taylor's Seedling Drawings
A Catalog of Cotyledons
by Thomas Taylor
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Overview


This book will serve as a reference for scientists, amateur botanists, seed enthusiasts, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the beginning of a plant's life. It contains two hundred meticulous seedling drawings of cultivated plants from around the world.

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Description


When plants are at the seedling stage, they look quite different from their vegetative stage. What started as this author's research into plant shoots eventually became a large portfolio of botanical art. The species cataloged in this book represent a variety of plant forms found growing in eastern North America, including trees, shrubs, flowers, and weeds.

Read more

Overview


This book will serve as a reference for scientists, amateur botanists, seed enthusiasts, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the beginning of a plant's life. It contains two hundred meticulous seedling drawings of cultivated plants from around the world.

Read more

Description


When plants are at the seedling stage, they look quite different from their vegetative stage. What started as this author's research into plant shoots eventually became a large portfolio of botanical art. The species cataloged in this book represent a variety of plant forms found growing in eastern North America, including trees, shrubs, flowers, and weeds.

Read more

Book details

Genre:GARDENING

Subgenre:Reference

Language:English

Pages:208

Paperback ISBN:9798218051808


Overview


This book will serve as a reference for scientists, amateur botanists, seed enthusiasts, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the beginning of a plant's life. It contains two hundred meticulous seedling drawings of cultivated plants from around the world.

Read more

Description


When plants are at the seedling stage, they look quite different from their vegetative stage. What started as this author's research into plant shoots eventually became a large portfolio of botanical art. The species cataloged in this book represent a variety of plant forms found growing in eastern North America, including trees, shrubs, flowers, and weeds.

Read more

About the author


Tom is a talented artist that made a career in drafting and design.

Read more

Book Reviews

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Thomas
Mary Ann Vinton, Ph.D., Professor For many a botanical researcher or casual gardener, identifying seedlings can be a difficult challenge. Experiments often involve controlling the number and types of seedlings in the field or greenhouse and plucking the undesirables. Even for the casual gardener growing plants from seeds, it is useful to distinguish weeds from target plants. Identifying adult plants has been greatly simplified by “apps” like iNaturalist, PlantNet, or PictureThis, but identifying seedlings is a more complex task. In some cases, like for tallgrass prairie restorations, seedling identification is crucial for properly managing the landscape. Thomas Taylor’s Taylor’s Seedling Drawings addresses this problem with drawings of seedlings in “a catalog of cotyledons,” containing renderings of 190 different species, presented alphabetically by plant family name. The species span both native and cultivated plants, including herbaceous and woody plants, growing in eastern North America. I was interested to see several species included, like lamb’s quarters, jimsonweed, prostrate spurge, and tree of heaven, which are frequent, weedy species in my region. While the bulk of the book (189 pp.) contains the plant drawings, Taylor provides a six-page introduction where he discusses his own background as a gardener and some general hints on seed germination, such as the need for stratification or scarification. He does not specify the germination requirements for each species, just general recommendations 2023294like “most plants from the temperate zone will need to be stratified.” Readers wanting more specific recommendations would do well to consult works like the classic Collecting, Processing and Germinating Seeds of Wildland Plants by Young and Young. Taylor also details the methods he undertook to grow the seedlings and produce the drawings, with details on light conditions and sketching and digitizing techniques. The drawings themselves are black and white, freehand sketches, with minimal shading; thus, they are not very technical or realistic. It appears that the goal was to represent some “key” characteristics of species rather than present a “photo-like,” 3-D, realistic rendering. For instance, the drawing for prostrate spurge is good for leaf margins, size, and number, but does not give an accurate sense of the 3-D structure of the leaf and stem arrangement. In other words, these drawings appear quite simple and two-dimensional. Stem height measurements are included, and colors are indicated with the help of a color code printed on the back cover. Now the important question: would this guide work? Suppose I had a student doing a “seed bank” study where they collected soil from a nearby prairie and wanted to identify the early seedlings. Here, I can’t say that I’m certain the guide would always work. A problem I can imagine would occur is the fact that the size, color, and shape of seedlings can vary with environment. Taylor does acknowledge that “a plant growing under intense sunlight does not obtain the same proportions as the same plant born in the shade” and addresses the issue by clearly specifying the conditions under which he produced the drawings, so at least that can be replicated. Leaving aside the issue of whether the guide consistently allows accurate seedling identification, I believe this guide could add to a library of useful references on the bookshelves of seedling aficionados. The prairie restoration literature is replete with plant guides, although some like Prairie Seedlings Illustrated: An Identification Guide by Dittmer and Jackson are booklets that can only be acquired from the authors. In my experience teaching botany, overseeing student projects, and growing my own seedlings, you can’t have too many plant guides, especially for seedlings. And I say this as an enthusiastic user of plant apps on my phone! Read more