In my two decades of observing the natural world, I have found that the most useful identification guidebooks are those in the Peterson series, or which follow a format like the Peterson series: text descriptions on the left page, line drawings or paintings on the right, with little arrows pointing out important details or field marks. This allows anywhere from 8 to 12 species per page, enabling a sufficiently comprehensive treatment in a volume compact enough to carry in the field. Unfortunately, the Peterson series has never published a wildflower guide to the Southeastern US. There are wildflower guides in this series for every other US region: Northeastern/North-Central; Southweatern/Texas; Great Plains; Rocky Mountains; Pacific States. While there is some overlap in species, there are also some species in the Southeast that do not occur in these other regions. In my search for a guide to wildflowers of the Southeast, I have found only two kinds of sources: technical floras, which use dichotomous keys and cover all angiosperms including trees, and are thus too large and cumbersome to carry in the field; and popular wildflower books that use photographs. The trouble with photographs are many: for one thing, only two or three species can be shown per page, thus necessitating a less comprehensive coverage. On any given day in the field, I encounter wildflowers not shown in the photographic guidebooks. Secondly, photographic guides tend to be biased toward those species with easily-seen, conspicuous flowers; you will not find many Chenopodiaceae, for example, in photographic guides. Thirdly, other vegetation in the photograph often obscures important details; the most egregious example I have found so far is in Batson 1987, _Wildflowers in the Carolinas_, University of South Carolina: on p.118, the photo of Utricularia. The Utricularia in the picture is much overshadowed by the showy yellow spadices of Orontium, such that it could appear that Orontium was the taxon being illustrated. For these reasons, I find photographic guidebooks nearly useless. Given that the Peterson series never published a wildflower guide to the Southeastern US, are there any guidebooks to this region which follow a similar format, and would thus be useful to me? Jason Hernandez
