For those who are willing to pause a while on a snowy day and trace time along the twigs, there is a language to be discovered. It is this language—of bark, resting buds, and leaf scars—that keys for identifying trees in winter, designed for the deciduous forests of the northern hemisphere, are dedicated to. These books, often dubbed twig keys for short, will guide you through a series of questions that lead you to a description of the species you are standing beside. But more importantly, they teach you to recognize the traces of seasonally recurring growth patterns.
This collection, Winter Twig Keys: Manuals for Tracing Time, brings together a representative sample of twig keys of the deciduous forests of the northern hemisphere.