Plants of Southern California: Resources To Help Beginners Identify Southern California Plants

Printed Books

Theodore F. Neihaus and Charles L. Ripper's Pacific States Wildflowers, 1976, $18.00
This Peterson Field Guide contains a key to and drawings of 1492 species, many of which are in California. This contains an excellent key to families that is by far the easiest to use for a beginner. The drawings have arrows pointing to the key features that help identify each species in the book.

Milt Mcauley's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, second edition, 1996, $19.95.
This book contains 473 pictures of plants, with almost as many line drawings, and is the single best value of all the Southern California picture books. It also has descriptions of each species, mostly in English words and measurements, not in botanical lingo and metric measurements. (Although metric measurements are much easier to use, if you are uncomfortable with them, you will prefer this.)

The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California, 1993, $85.00. (You can sometimes find a used copy in excellent condition much cheaper.)
This is the standard current reference for ALL plants in the entire state of California. It contains a key to and description of ~8000 species and subspecies. Even better, it contains over 4000 accurate drawings that illustrate the identification features for each species. It also contains an illustrated glossary and essays on commonness and rarity, geographic subdivisions of California, and geologic and botanic history of California.
The descriptions of ~8000 species and subspecies are online, but not the key or the drawings.
The major drawback is that it is written in botanical lingo and, for people unfamiliar with the metric system, it uses metric measurements.

James G. Harris and Melinda Woolf Harris' Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary, second edition, 2001, $18.95.
This is a great companion to The Jepson Manual, since it is often difficult to grasp meanings of a lot of botanical terms.

Web References

A complete list is given in California Plant Pictures and Databases,
http://tchester.org/plants/lists/calif_pix_and_db.html

Examples:

Calflora database of 8,363 vascular plants, presenting the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project (see next entry) information in a single interface.
http://www.calflora.org/
Calflora also contains:

• an Occurrence (Observations) Database with 660,000 records of plant observations: Simple Query and Advanced Query.
• California Plant Synonyms (Experimental) (translates older scientific names to currently recognized names, or finds synonyms for names in current use, with 15,004 synonyms)

UC Berkeley Digital Library Project's Calphotos of over 30,000 images of over 3600 species of mostly California plants and fungi
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/flora/

Specimen MAnagement System for California Herbaria (SMASCH, a database of text data and images of specimens that document the distribution and classification of the plants of California, with information from over 300,000 specimens. Query Accession Records )

There are three additional sites that each contain pictures of ~1,000 of Southern California species, and about ten sites that contains pictures of hundreds of Southern California species.

Go to:

• Native and Introduced Plants of Southern California
• Field Guide to the San Gabriel Mountains: Natural History: Plants