David Joyce"s outstanding plant encyclopedia, first published in Great Britain, has detailed descriptions and photographs of more than 3,000 plants. Though it still contains descriptions of worldwide plant communities (that show, for example, the similarities and differences between the prairies of Texas, European alpine meadows, and the grasslands of Africa and New Zealand), the plant directory has been adapted to the North American climate (which ranges from zone 1 to zone 11) by John Elsley. The directory is sorted into trees, shrubs, conifers, climbers, roses, perennials, bulbs/corms/tubers, annuals/biennials, and bamboos/grasses/ferns. With its nicely detailed listings, highly readable layout, and small but luminously clear photographs, this is the book you"ll want to take along to the nursery.