‘Weeds of the South’ recommended
Oct 22, 2009 9:55 AM, By David Bennett, Farm Press Editorial Staff
The book can be purchased through Amazon at Weeds of the South.
Other attempts had been made to leave the binders behind. Just before taking a job with Pioneer some 15 years ago, DeFelice began work on an interactive software version of the binder. “Actually, the DVD Interactive Encyclopedia of North American Weeds is still available. It’s currently in version three. People like books, but I must admit the software is my first love — it’s interactive, there’s a lot of teaching lessons on it and it contains twice the photographs. Actually, it’s a nice supplement to the books. But we’ve sold more Weeds of the South in two weeks than we have the software in four years.”
Bryson is very complimentary of the software — “full of very useful bells and whistles” — but unfortunately, “many folks don’t find the utility of a laptop and software in a hot, dusty vehicle or turn-row. So we thought, ‘why not put these weeds in a book?’”
The Southern Weed Science Society agreed as did photographer Arlyn Evans. Evans, whose work in the book is of the highest quality, had been working on weed photography long before the book process began.
“In the early 1980s Arlyn retired but still wanted to be involved in weed science. Chester McWhorter (the Southern Weed Science lab director at Stoneville, Miss.) knew that Evans had a great love for photography,” says Bryson. “He suggested they grow weeds in the greenhouse at Stoneville and Evans could come down and photograph them. That way everything would be uniform — background, soils, etc. They started off with the first set and it continued from there. Arlyn has a tremendous volume of slides from those efforts. For the book, we narrowed them down to the best photos.”
The photography culls over 60 years of Evan’s work. The book “literally represents a lifetime of work,” says DeFelice. “He has a bunch of stories. One of the photos he shot out at White Sands, N.M., in the 1950s, before I was born. He was working and the Army arrived and said it was time to leave. They were preparing to fire missiles.”
Photos selected were most important for identification and to cover as many parts as possible of a particular weed’s life history.
“For instance, we wanted to use a photo of seeds or fruit, a photo of an immature plant, a photo of a mature plant with flowers,” says Bryson. “In some cases things like purple and yellow nutsedge with rhizomes and tubers were very important. We also wanted to show that reproductive capability could be from rhizomes and tubers rather than just seeds.”
One unique thing about Weeds of the South is the descriptions are reformatted in a way “that it’s easier to look at an immature plant, a whole mature plant description, specialized identifying features and the plant’s toxicity. Each of the descriptions begins with the accepted, common name of the weed based on the Weed Science Society of America’s composite list. The weed’s synonyms — both scientific and common — follow.”
The process
Once the book proposal was approved, the SWSS began looking for a potential publisher.
“Bill Vencill (weed scientist) at the University of Georgia had contacts with his university press — and SWSS had a good track record with them previously (through reprinting Jim Miller’s Forest Plants of the Southeast and Their Wildlife Uses),” says Bryson.
