In spring, summer, and fall the Natchez Trace teems with colorful wildflowers. This handbook for travelers and for nature lovers selects and describes one hundred of the most common that flourish along the roadside, on adjacent trails, and in nature areas.

This landscape is lush in botanical abundance, with almost seven hundred plant species growing along the Trace and on nearby lands. Many are native. Others have been introduced from outside the region and have become naturalized. This guidebook features the great variety of the Trace's herbaceous and woody plants that have showy flowers. For ease in reference these are sequenced by color. Each is represented in a full-color photograph and with detailed information including its common and scientific names, family, habitat, leaves, flowering dates, size, fruit, uses, distribution, and related species.

For the thousands who travel along the Natchez Trace, the myriad wildflowers add to the special joy of the scenic drive. A unit of the National Park Service, the Trace is America's longest national park—450 miles. In earliest times a pathway for migrating wildlife, it became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a military road and a route for traders and settlers moving into the Southwest. Replicating the original trail, the modern Trace winds over prairies and through woodlands of pines, gums, and hardwoods, extending from Nashville, Tennessee, through a corner of Alabama, and across Mississippi to Natchez on the Mississippi River.

With this helpful and appealing book in the car or the backpack, those who travel or hike along the Trace can heighten the natural wonder through a study of its profusion of wildflowers.