By Alan Branhagen 

• Publisher: Timber Press, July 2020 

• Paperback‏:‎ 256 pages 

• ISBN-10: 160469992 

• Dimensions: 8” X 9” 

• Price: $35.74 (Amazon.ca); $19.42 (Amazon.com – currently a 22% discount) 

At first glance, Branhagen’s The Midwest Native Plant Primer looks like a great book for native plant gardeners. It has almost 45 pages in the introduction alone that covers topics like Why Cultivate Native Plants, and goes into some detail on what defines the Midwest, looking at the various habitats (grasslands, forests). And it is chock full of beautiful photos.  

There’s a whole chapter on selecting native plants – how to choose your plant and what to avoid (i.e. right plant, wrong place), with a short section on gardening for birds and one on gardening for butterflies. He talks about the aesthetics of native plants in the garden (form, colour, fragrance, etc.), then devotes a chapter to Designing with Native Plants. 

With lots of beautiful photographs and some great information in the lengthy introductory section, at one time I would likely have found this book delightful. But maybe my collection of books on native plant gardening is just getting too big. I found that the actual plant information is quite limited so it is unclear who its target market is or even what the overall purpose is. This book might make a great introductory book to native plants, but there are several overview books in print already and this one doesn’t really offer anything new. What’s worse, it misses out in a number of areas to be of any great value to a native plant gardener. 

For starters, by the author’s own admission the “Midwest” is a very large region and he states that plants that do well in one area may not even survive in another, yet nowhere does the author let the reader know where any of the suggested plants will survive, let alone thrive. The need for accurate range maps is crucial for native plant gardeners who, more so than other gardeners, want to know what is native to their location. 

The next issue is the alphabetization of the plants by common name. As with other books that use this strategy, the fact that there are often many common names for a plant, but typically only one currently accepted scientific name, means that locating a plant of interest in this book can be a challenge. For instance, I searched the index high and low for Wild Columbine, then for Wild Red Columbine, then Red Columbine and even just Columbine – all names that I am familiar with – but none of these were in the index. Fortunately I knew the scientific name was Aquilegia canadensis and could look that up, only to discover the plant was listed as Eastern Red Columbine. No wonder I couldn’t locate it. Another advantage of listing by scientific names is that similar plants (i.e. plants of the same genus) will be grouped together. For example, the milkweeds (Asclepias) will be grouped in one area, the goldenrods (Solidago), in another, etc.  

This book does group the plants into the following separate sections: trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and perennials and vines, but within each grouping you need to know the sometimes very locally-known common name to find it. 

I do appreciate the attempt at colour coding each of the sections of the book with a different coloured bar at the top of the pages. However, a greater differentiation of colours might have made separating the sections easier – they are all shades of purple and telling where the section on shrubs ends and the one on groundcovers begins, for example, is almost impossible.  

I did have one problem with the section on ground covers, though. It is rather confusing when it includes things like Chasmanthium latifolium (called river oats in the book, but more commonly known as northern sea oats) which grows up to 3′ high, or Phlox paniculata (garden phlox) which often grows 4′ tall. Not what I would think of as ground covers. 

Even more confusing, though, is the entry for Bugbane (Cimicifuga racemosa) – known more commonly as Black Cohosh, Black Baneberry, Black Snakeroot, or even as Squawroot in some regions. For starters, Bugbane is normally reserved for the species Actaea simplex (formerly Cimicifuga simplex), a native of Russia and China. In addition, most sources now accept the genus name Actaea rather than the older Cimicifuga for this plant. And there are lots more similar examples in the book. 

And although there are lots of beautiful photos in the book, they are only somewhat useful to help you identify the plants, as they typically show a photo of the overall plant without much detail. As a result, they don’t help you a lot in identifying whether the plant you have is what is shown in the book. And in some cases, as with Eurybia macrophylla, or large leaf aster, they don’t even show a picture of the flowers, just of the leaves. 

Finally, the most confusing part of the book has to be the fact that the author mentions both USDA plant hardiness zones and AHS (American Horticultural Society) heat zones in the introduction AND in a table at the back of the book. However, since he does not provide the relevant ranges for any of the plants in the plant descriptions, I’m not sure why this information is even in the book. This seems to be a major oversight.  

Some of these oversights and problems may not be soley the author’s fault. I have talked to other authors who have published with Timber Press who told me the publisher left out what the author believed were important parts, simply to save money.  

All in all, this is a pleasant book to look through, especially if you are new to native plant gardening and just want an introduction to the topic. And since you can never have TOO MANY books on the topic, this might make a good addition to your collection. Especially if you live in an area that might be considered part of the Midwest. But for me the book was rather disappointing.