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– “Montana’s Pioneer Botanists is a delight of a book right from the start. Appealing cover design, lush interior colors, high quality paper, visually pleasing layout.” Full review from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas
– Here is a great review on a beautiful page published by the New York Botanical Garden.
– “Editors Rachel Potter and Peter Lesica have crafted not a dry biographical tome, but a bright and lively read full of colorful photos, illustrations, and interesting stories about the early efforts to catalogue, identify, and study Montana’s rich plant life and history.” – Chris Peterson, Hungry Horse News said in his review.
– “Men and women have been studying and celebrating Montana’s flora for centuries. At last, a book about these botanical pioneers that’s comprehensive, wonderfully detailed, and as fresh and alluring as the flora they loved. The authors, present-day native-plant devotés who know their stuff and their state, have given us not just a vital resource, but a delightful and inspiring read.” – Beth Judy, aka Flora Delaterre, “The Plant Detective”
– “Hear ye, hear ye! Librarians, botanists, herbarium curators, historians, book aficionados! You are going to love Montana’s Pioneer Botanists, a gold mine of information about botanical exploration in Montana, beginning with indigenous people and ending with Klaus Lackschewitz (1911-1995). Editors Rachel Potter and Peter Lesica have produced a magnificent compendium of 31 historical essays written by 18 authors, many with a special connection to or knowledge of the botanist about whom they were writing. Photos of botanists and plants associated with them are skillfully interspersed within the essays.” – Dr. Patricia Holmgren, Director Emerita, New York Botanical Garden Herbarium said in her review.
– Here is a review by Aaron Parrett announcing an award for the book that appeared in “The Montana Book Roundup” in Montana: The Magazine of Western History during the winter 2019:
The award for production values this year must go to Rachel Potter and Peter Lesica’s collection of biographical essays, Montana’s Pioneer Botanists: Exploring the Mountains and the Prairies (Montana Native Plant Society, 2017). The photographs throughout this edition leap from the page in vibrant hues, immersing the reader in a tableau of botanical specimens to accompany the splendid period portraits of the botanists this team of essayists have profiled. While Lesica and Potter have composed the majority of the profiles composed here, a dozen other authors document the various contributions of Montana botanists, from the first inhabitants before the Europeans to figures who have only recently passed away. Wayne Phillips, who himself has written some of the best available wildflower and plant guides for Montana, weighs in here with a thorough and concise summary of Meriweather Lewis’s contributions to the subject, performing admirably in fulfillment of Jefferson’s charge to ‘notice the face of the country, its growth & vegetable productions especially those not of the US….the dates at which particular plants put forth their flowers, or leaf'(9). Similarly, Robert Dorn’s essay on William Edwin Booth (1908-1987) is a must-read, detailing as it does so competently the life and work of a man who ‘contributed more to our knowledge of the flora of Montana than any other individual'(128). Though he was an ecologist by training, Dorn notes that Booth ‘readily adapted to taxonomy,’ and made the only collection of inland New Jersey tea (Ceanothus herbaceus) in 1948 in Powder River County, a rarity that has never been found there or elsewhere since.”