New this month from Heyday Books and Sierra College Press, Flowering Plants of the Sierra Nevada: A Photographic Guide to Over 1000 Wildflowers is much more than a photographic guidebook. The extended introduction addresses Native People and their uses of flowering plants, along with sections that orient readers to climate, geography, and geophysical features. Add to this the elevation charts and the overview of geology and soils by ecological zone, and the result is a compact primer on the natural sciences of the Sierra Nevada. This very complete, well-designed guide by authors Joanna Clines and Stephen Sharnoff offers a sequential introduction that serves as an accessible overview and a valuable reference for identifying wildflowers.
From this excellent orientation, the authors move into key elements of botany, providing essential structure for building strong identification skills with a focus on flowering plants throughout the Sierra. The combination of photographs, illustrations, and charts makes this a useful guide for almost any naturalist. Clear illustrations demystify terms like “ligulate head” and “compound umbel”—precise descriptions that simplify flowering-plant identification and turn it into a process of elemental deduction. This is often lacking in wildflower identification books that rely primarily on images. (Who knew that a compound umbel could make identifying a plant so straightforward!)
“What does this book include? About half of the vascular plant species found in the U.S. occur in California—some 5,500 species, counting both native and introduced ones; about 3,500 of these occur in the Sierra Nevada. This book covers some 950 species of wildflowers throughout the Sierra Nevada.” —Peter H. Raven, from the foreword to Flowering Plants of the Sierra Nevada: A Photographic Guide to Over 1000 Wildflowers
This thoroughly researched and highly readable guide draws deeply from the authors’ long history with the region, reflecting years of accumulated experience and a shared family love of the Sierra and its abundant wildflowers. In many respects, Flowering Plants of the Sierra Nevada is a multigenerational amalgam of science, observation, and passion for the region’s wild beauty.
In the foreword, Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden, discusses his family’s connection to the Sierra and the “Range of Light,” touching on the work of John Thomas Howell, Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, and his dedication to collecting and accurately identifying the diverse plants of this unique region—one that is both fragile and resilient. Raven notes that Howell would be pleased to see this compendium of information compiled and readily available.
“The Sierra Nevada runs for some 400 miles north and south through eastern California, extending from the Cascades south to the Mojave Desert; it covers about a quarter of the state’s land area. The mountains are about 80 miles wide at Lake Tahoe, where the range straddles the Nevada border, and 50 miles wide in the south. The Sierra Nevada separates the high desert basins to the east from the Great Valley of California to the west, rising steeply from the desert and sloping more gently down to the valley. Huge cliffs and slopes of amazing silvery granitic rocks dominate much of the Sierra, which led the early naturalist and conservationist John Muir to give it the lasting name ‘the Range of Light,’ a lovely and apt term that helped bring the mountains to the attention of a wider public.” —Peter H. Raven
This book encourages readers to observe keenly and, one hopes, tread lightly.
Just in time for holiday gifting, it is available locally at The Bookseller in Grass Valley and Harmony Books in Nevada City, and through Heyday.
Book by Joanna Clines and Stephen Sharnoff, Heyday Books and Sierra College Press
Flexi-bound, 10 x 7, 608 pages | Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781597146876