Natural History of the South
The Press's regional commitment extends to titles on southern flora and fauna. The range of publications is so extensive that for exhibition purposes we have narrowed our focus to books on southern flora. More space would have permitted the inclusion of Eloise Potter's comprehensive Birds of the Carolinas (1980), with its full-color photographs; Charlotte Hilton Green's delightfully written and charmingly illustrated Birds of the South (1933), as well as her Trees of the South (1939); and William C. Coker's and Henry R. Totten's Trees of the Southeastern States (1934), long the standard book on the subject.
The Southern GardenThe motto of Harry R. Phillips's Growing and Propagating Wild Flowers (1985) is "conservation through propagation." Developed by the staff at the North Carolina Botanical Garden at Chapel Hill in response to the growing market for our state's native flowers, it provides easy-to-follow instructions for growing wild flowers from seeds, cuttings, or divisions.
Appreciating Our Native Flora
Among the many books published by the Press that have increased
our understanding and appreciation of North Carolina's native plant life,
two stand out. Acknowledging the integral relationship between particular
plants and particular environments, B. W. Wells's The Natural Gardens
of North Carolina (1932) is one of the first ecological studies of the
South. Wells describes the state's eleven major plant communities and
provides a simple key to the herbaceous wild flowers of the state.
One of the first state wild flower guides, William Justice's and Ritchie Bell's Wild Flowers of North Carolina and Surrounding Areas (1968) is a comprehensive field manual to the wild flowers, trees, shrubs, vines, herbs, and weeds of the Carolinas and neighboring areas in Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. To help the user identify plants, it features 400 full-color photographs and describes the habitat, range, size, and months of bloom.
Botanical Scholarship
In addition to books intended for general use, the Press publishes
botanical texts for specialists. Manual of the Vascular Flora of the
Carolinas, co-authored by Albert E. Radford, Harry E. Ahles, and C.
Ritchie Bell, is an exhaustive, 1200-page guide that, since its
publication in 1968, has proven indispensable to botanists, students,
teachers, foresters, and conservationists. Based on nearly 200,000
specially gathered specimens, the book is the standard work on the
subject.
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