About half of the main entry species have good color photos and half of these are of flowers, with the rest evenly divided between fruits, fall color, and bark. The small black and white photos are generally effective, but a few of the twigs are too murky to be useful. One of these, labelled as Metasequoia foliage on p. 410, is the photo of a small trunk of Thuja occidentalis from p. 412, turned on its side. There are also a few examples of discrepancies between features in the photographs and their verbal descriptions. The descriptions were also occasionally marred by word processing glitches, like a bit of the leaf description of Populus grandidentata repeated under the twigs.
Size brings up the question of demarcation.
It would be a rare event, indeed, to find a tree of one of these species and some of them never reach tree size within the central hardwoods region, even if they might do so southward. On the side of omission, this book also follows most of its predecessors in skimpy treatment of hawthorns, one of the most prominent genera in the region, with a full description of the genus and brief treatment of four species. This is the only native genus given such short shrift. While difficult, hawthorns aren't a lot more difficult than willows and shouldn't just be ignored. Sargent, of course is one of the three authors who created abhorrence for hawthorns, while Braun's account was written by Ernest Palmer, who spent much of his career trying to stuff this genie back in its bottle.