by Kelly Schultz, Lake County Forest Preserves and Volunteer Steward Dale Shields.

The story on how these came about, in the words of Dale Shields….

A few years ago, after I started volunteering at the Lake County Native Seed Nursery, I decided to try to make use of my photography hobby with my volunteer work.  I had noted that all the published field guides showed plants in flower, but not what they look like when it’s time to collect seed, so I started taking pictures of plants when the seed was ripe. 

People had been telling Kelly Schultz, director of the nursery at that time, that she could write a book with her knowledge of seed collection and propagation lore.  So we decided to work together to make a set of pictorial guides. 

We used the Field Museum’s field Guide format and have completed a set of 12 field guides showing native (and some adventive) plants.  We originally divided the guides up according to season and habitat to keep each guide a size that we could email out to Lake County volunteers. The guides are ordered roughly by photo date, with exceptions to put similar looking plants together.  An index is available to help determine what species might be found in which guide. 

Link to the Field Museum guides, including the seed guides follows.  Note once there you can access an index list of all the species covered in the guide:  https://fieldguides.fieldmuseum.org/guides