How to know the wild flowers: A Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of Our Common Wild Flowers

About this book

How to Know the Wild Flowers is a practical field guide by Frances Theodora Parsons, first issued in 1893, that seeks to turn a casual stroll through New England woods into a more informed adventure. The opening pages explain the author’s frustration with overly technical keys and promise a portable handbook that lists common native species by colour, season and habit, while omitting the ubiquitous buttercups and the obscure weeds that crowd the pages of scholarly manuals. With ninety‑seven hand‑drawn plates taken directly from nature, each entry supplies a familiar English name, the Latin binomial, and the family to which the plant belongs, plus concise notes on size, habitat and flowering time. The work is organized to let a reader sort a “little blue flower” or a “large pink flower” by eye, then trace it through the seasonal sections, making identification as straightforward as possible.

Written in the earnest, didactic voice of a late‑Victorian naturalist, the text blends clear instruction with a gentle reverence for the countryside. Its style is conversational yet grounded in the botanical standards of the day, citing Gray’s Manual and encouraging simple tools, a magnifying glass and a notebook, to deepen observation. The guide will appeal to amateur botanists, nature lovers, and anyone who enjoys wandering the fields of the Northeastern United States and wishes to recognize the flora without wading through dense Latin jargon.

Opening lines

The pleasure of a walk in the woods and fields is enhanced a hundredfold by some little knowledge of the flowers which we meet at every turn. Their names alone serve as a clew to their entire histories, giving us that sense of companionship with our surroundings which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of outdoor life. But if we have never studied botany it has been no easy matter to learn these names, for we find that the very people who have always lived among the flowers are often ignorant of even their common titles, and frequently increase our eventual confusion by naming them incorrectly. While it is more than probable that any attempt to attain our end by means of some “Key,” which positively bristles with technical terms and outlandish titles, has only led us to replace the volume in despair, sighing with Emerson, that these scholars …

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