Canter Bridge

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These field guides are excellent resources for the novice, whether they treat of fauna like your region’s birds or flora like your trees. This is because they group each specimen visually for easy location: by color for birds and by leave structure for trees.

You can hardly find a better niche for getting a toehold on your Indiana backyard’s critters and trees.

Stan Tekiela’s Trees of Indiana Field Guide majors on the educational. The author invests his first pages in helping you get a grip on the undifferentiated mass of green at the back of your house, mentoring you gently through leaf and needle shapes.

Then two pages cover each specimen, the first to extremely well-done photography and the second to a well-organized prose description of the trees vital statistics.

I moved from Costa Rica’s natural bounty to the tamer environs of Indianapolis three years ago. Having mastered the birds that come to my feeders, I now turn to working out the plethora of trees that the previous stewards of our 1930s-vintage home left as the natural richness that cradles our house.

Stan Tekiela’s Trees of Indiana will be one of my guides as I do.