Conifers Around the World

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Conifers Around the World presents 500 species of conifers of 52 genera, including several that are new to science.

This book is the outcome of an ambitious 30-year project to search out and document all the conifers in the world's temperate zones and their adjacent regions - if possible in their most pristine natural habitats. The authors spent almost 2,000 days in the field on the trail of conifers. They were able to visit and document the world's most inaccessible conifer taxa and to include the accompanying flora and vegetation in their documentation. They compiled a collection of 340,000 photographs representing thousands of taxa and backed with precise documentation.

The two volumes contain:
*An in-depth, richly illustrated introduction to conifers and the regions to which they are native.
*520 Species plates, arranged geographically into fourteen regions, each containing three to five detail shots that highlight the species' most characteristic features and one shot showing the tree(s) growing in the wild. A brief text accompanying each plate provides essential descriptive and historical information.
*120 habitat photographs showing the most picturesque conifer habitats on five continents.
*A unique Bark Gallery containing 740 color photographs taken in the wild.
*500 detail drawings presenting the morphological characters of each of the 52 genera covered.

Conifers Around the World will appeal to a wide variety of readers, from scholars to armchair travelers. The book's unique organization presents the species by region, offering a realistic picture of their worldwide distribution. Starting in Europe, the reader is invited to follow the conifers through Asia Minor and North Africa to China and Japan, then to the Americas (explored from west to east and then south), and finally to Tasmania and New Zealand. By presenting, for example, all the Southeast Asian conifers consecutively on 150 pages, their whole ecological range is brought together as never before. One can, as it were, audition a region's trees in the wild, and see how great age and the forces of nature can vary the appearance of even well known species.
500 distribution maps that provide a visual image of the natural range of each species discussed.