The Completed Encyclopedia of Trees of the World: The ultimate reference and identification guide to more than 1300 of the most spectacular, ... illustrations, maps and photographs Hardcover – September 7, 2014

If I had given a review after having this book for five minutes I would have given it five stars. But after digging deeper I found a lot of short comings.I first noticed that the species distribution maps are dramatically inaccurate. First let’s turn to the American elm on page 141. It looks like in their research the authors read that this tree grows "as far north as Saskatchewan and as far south as Florida and Texas." Then they took a map of North America, colored in Saskatchewan, Florida, Texas, and everything in between. In the process they left out about 50% of its actual range, including the northeastern United States where the tree is most well-known. On the same page we see the Hackberry. It shows the tree growing throughout Alaska, from the Melville Peninsula in Nunavut, to Labrador, and all the way down to about Mexico City. Quite impressive! The actual range of this tree is only about 600,000 square miles in the American Midwest. This is an example of where a picture actually depreciates information. To say the tree “grows in North America” is accurate. But when you draw a map of North America and color everything in, you now have a margin of error of 1275%. Moving over to page 141 we have the Zelkova serrata. With this map it looks like the authors just colored in countries where the tree is found. Trees don’t generally respect political boundaries, which makes the map pretty suspicious. These are just three examples from two pages; there are many others throughout the book.The second issue I have was that there were trees not in the book, such as my state tree, the Longleaf pine. Amazon changed the title of the book on its listing, but if you look at the cover image you will see the word “complete” in the real title. The subtitle says “The ultimate … guide to more than 1300 … trees”. It kind of ruins the meaning of the word “complete” when you refer to your own arbitrary list you made up yourself. I know there are a lot of trees in the world, and putting them all in one volume would be a challenge, but let’s be reasonable. There are 600 species of quercus alone, and this book has 37. “Complete” is not a word I would use. What makes this especially ironic though, is that they didn’t run out of page space in the book. Instead they listed several trees twice! Apparently this is because the book is actually three previously published books which were thrown together without the editor deconflicting between them. Each of these books covered a geographic region, and so this is how the book is organized. This is somewhat forgivable for the Common juniper, a tree found in both hemispheres, but less forgivable with the Cedar of Lebanon included under “Trees of Temperate America” and the Giant Sequioa included under “Trees of Britain and Europe”. I’m not about to count all the trees in the volume, but it does make me doubt their 1300 figure given on the cover.Having said all of that, there really are a lot of good things about the book. It is still the most comprehensive book of world trees that I have found. The illustrations are quite nice, and I especially liked the early chapters which dealt with general tree topics. I hope, however, that the authors will come back to this project at some point, because this has the potential to be a really great book.

I liked the information about each tree such as the continent from which it grows/lives. I am using this book for reference for my artwork.

Excellent book

Really in depth book with huge amounts of information. Nice size, slightly heavy.Highly recommended.

This is an excellent book. Better than I expected. Lovely to dip into now and then as well as for reference.

Great book, very clear categorization of the trees. In fact it's really easy to look up trees you see in front of you, and the illustrations are great and very accurate. Though the format and weight is not really comfortable when you're out in the forest or in the mountains.

JUST SUPERB - opening every day Big Thank you

best for library