Cambria Monarchs

[Will Pratt]

Assuming you mean for California, the present standard is James C. Hickman,
ed., 1993, _The Jepson manual, Higher plants of California_, Berkeley: Univ
CA Press.  Pictures restricted to line drawings of about 4000 species of the
total 5682 species of vascular plants known from California as of
publication, all of which are included in the keys and descriptions.  There
are simply too many species of plants to fully cover in standard fieldguide
type publications.  The drawings in the manual are intended for checking
after you've got an identification by working your way through a key.

_Field guide to Pacific states wildflowers_, by Niehaus & Ripper includes
about 1492 spp of herbaceous or semi-shrubby species, though some don't get
into California, so the representation for that state is less than that.
The "California natural history guide" series published by Univ. CA Press
divides up the state into regions, and the tree guides are fairly complete,
but the shrub guides are not.  They will allow identification of the common,
dominant species, and usually get you to a relative for the les abundant
ones.  The "wildflower" guides in the series are wildly incomplete.

There are some smaller, regional floras using color pictures which are
fairly complete to the limited region each covers.  I can't provide any
names of examples, off the top of my head.  There are also some regional
"wildflower" and "tree and shrub" guides that are actually complete; these
are keys with  line drawings illustrating the characters at each key choice,
though.

Hope this is of some help,

Will

--
--
William L. Pratt, Ph.D., Curator of Invertebrates, Barrick Museum
Mail Stop 4012, Univ. Nevada, Las Vegas 89154-4012
(702) 895-1403; Fax (702) 895-3094; prattw at nevada.edu


Christine A. Morigi wrote in message
<79023F1D2F1CD21188F100805FE60B0FC0FBE7 at NT_EXCHANGE1>...
<snip>
>I'm on the hunt for a host plant identification reference source. Any
>recommendations to a good book would be appreciated. Color pictures
>preferred.
>
>Chris Morigi