Excerpt from Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs: A Concise Description
There is a very considerable number of native trees and shrubs of these United States many of which are not as well known as they should be. I do not refer, of course, to such common trees as the Sugar Maple, Fir, and American Elm, but to their less familiar relatives and to the numerous interesting shrubs which are far from uncommon throughout the land. This book is intended, therefore, not only to furnish the reader with a means for identifying such species, but to demonstrate certain truths relative to form and color which are more within the province of the artist than the botanist and which naturally do not appear in text-books on botany. A particular tree, for instance, possesses a typical figure and a tone of green different from that of its associates. There is no reason why these differences should not be described with as much exactness as possible.
Moreover, it is important to record the fact that Nature is manifold in her differences - there are no two things alike, yet there are salient types. It is best to know that the individuals of a species are not all run in the same mold, that botanical rules cannot circumscribe all truth, that what one sees may be very different from what another sees, that even expressed expert opinion upon a given species leads to polemics in botany the outcome of which we will do well to await with patience.
Botany does not stand still, it moves. there used to be a score of species of Crataegus - to-day there are more than two hundred!
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