Leo J. Hickey

Published in Association with the New York Botanical GardenThe Manual of Leaf Architecture is an essential reference for describing, comparing, and classifying the leaves of flowering plants. This manual, illustrated with dozens of line drawings and more than 300 photographs of prepared stained leaves, provides a framework with comparative examples allowing consistent and detailed description of both modern and fossil leaves. This one-of-a-kind resource will be invaluable to a broad range of people who work with plants, from paleobotanists to systematists to tropical ecologists. The Manual allows for the description and identification of plants independently of their flowers, offering especially useful assistance in the case of fossil leaves (usually found in isolation) and tropical plants, whose flowering cycles can be brief and irregular, and whose fruits and flowers may be difficult to access. It provides long-needed guidelines for characterizing the organization, shape, venation, and margins of the leaves of flowering plants. Beginning with a set of illustrated definitions of leaf characters, this manual proceeds to define and illustrate the variations on each of these characters. The system presented here is based on a widely tested scheme but has been significantly expanded and refined through the detailed examination of thousands of living and fossil leaves.

Wood—perhaps no natural material has been used longer by man, and none seems more suited to human tastes and needs. Its properties are the result of a long evolutionary history as an integral part of the earth's forests. This story describes what it is, explores how it is put together, and recounts the story of wood from its origin, giving us new insights into this familiar material all around us, as well as into the petrified wood that occurs so abundantly in the fossil record. Distributed for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History