Strategy for tree and shrub identification

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I often find it difficult to identify trees and shrubs even though I have many handbooks and manuals on trees and shrubs in my area (New England). The typical problem is that the species is not in the handbook, or that it is very similar to many other species. For example, hawthorns have many different species which are very similar to each other and most books do not exhaustively list the different hawthorns and their distinguishing characteristics, instead just listing one or two of them.

Web sites are even more fragmented than books and are usually a lot less detailed than the books so even if I search around, the results are often useless.

Am I going about this wrong? What improvements can I make to my strategy for identify trees and shrubs?