Louisiana Wildflower Guide (ISBN 0-9718625-2-4) by Allen, Wilson and Winters is a newly published work that covers many of the common and some uncommon or even rare wildflower species. The 251 page book will be useful in identifying plants not only in Louisiana but also throughout the southeast from Texas to the Carolinas. More than 500 color photos are included and are the culmination of the years of photography by Ken Wilson. The text is a product of the lifetime botanical quests of Dr. Charles Allen. A set of charts that will narrow down your choices by several characteristics including flower color, habitat, leaf arrangement, and leaf type will facilitate the identification of genera. Generic and species descriptions are included and are detailed enough for usefulness but not too long and cumbersome. Tips for the identification of many species are included in the descriptions. For each species, the flowering dates, habitat, and distribution are given. A glossary, plant anatomy line drawings, and index close out the book. It is published by Allen’s Native Ventures; 5070 Hwy 399; Pitkin, LA 70656; 337-328-2252 and can be ordered online from www.nativeventures.net.

Writing under the pseudonym Catharine Cole, Martha R. Field (1855-1898) became the first full-time newswoman for the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1881. For more than a decade she was the woman's page editor and wrote a Sunday column, "Catharine Cole's Letter," that established her as one of the most popular writers in the South.

Cole wrote about her journeys through Louisiana's rural parishes by rail, steamboat, carriage, buggy, and on foot, revealing much about an exotic, unspoiled Louisiana and the Gilded Age South as a whole. Louisiana Voyages gathers these travel writings for the first time. Includes chapters on Grand Isle, Pointe Coupee Parish, Natchitoches Parish, the Swampers of Livingston Parish, Assumption Parish, Morgan City, Sabine Parish, Baton Rouge, and much, much more.

Excerpts from the chapter covering Vernon Parish:

       "Here is pine forest in all its splendor..."
       "Creeks filled with fish thread this parish; half of them flow West into the Sabine, half East into the Calcasieu, which has its pretty beginnings in Vernon."
       "The people lead simple, moral, thrifty lives. They raise all they consume, know nothing of luxuries beyond gorgeous cooking stoves... ... save their money in a stocking foot, go to camp meeting once a year, have a deer drive and a fishing bout whenever they can, and are happy and contented..."

This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few Southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes' is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864.

Haynes' memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of Texas and thus became a hunted man. He also tells of his harrowing odyssey to reach Union troops in Louisiana. Every step of the way, Haynes provides details, sometimes graphic, of the harassment and cruelty he and many others like him suffered at the hands of his Confederate neighbors.