As an avid hiker, I'm frequently asked what resource materials can help people identify the flora growing along our Hawaiian paths.

Now that my friend John Hall, a fellow docent hike leader with The Nature Conservancy, has just authored "A Hiker's Guide to Trailside Plants in Hawai'i," I can point them to his paperback.

John was born in Denver, where he first found love in Mother Nature. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California-Berkeley and became an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, and later a professor of microbiology.

John has received Fulbright scholarships and has taught in an array of countries, including Belize, Nepal, New Zealand and Turkey. He also has walked the trails of Hawai'i for over 40 years.

The book is segmented into the diverse climactic and elevation regions a hiker in Hawai'i would trek: coastal, dry forest, mesic forest, wet forest and alpine. Within each individual zone, plants are categorized as herbs, shrubs, trees, vines, ferns and miscellaneous. For quick and easy searching, the page edges are color-coded by climate: blue for coastal, brown for dry, red for mesic, green for wet and and gray-green for alpine.

A nutshell narrative for each covered plant includes its baseline vegetative data, historical introduction to Hawai'i, ethnobotanical facts regarding cultural uses and significance.

"I really enjoyed doing the research on each plant and learning interesting things about it," John told me. "And I enjoyed writing up the things I found appealing in the hopes that others would find the same pleasure. I didn't feel that just being able to put a name to a plant was of much attraction, but that if I could give people a reason to find a plant of interest, it would make it easier to remember it and to care about it."

John also explained to me why he didn't exclusively target native Hawaiian plants: "I wanted a trail guide that would allow the hiker without any knowledge of the plants to identify what he was seeing along the trail, and since most of what we see, at least at the lower elevations, are introduced weeds, I felt we had to include these — the hiker would get too discouraged if 90 percent of the things he wanted to identify were not in the book."

What you see is what you get, so John includes the plants whose invasive/alien characteristics so fiercely and alarmingly encroach the trails of Hawai'i.

John wrangled with the issue and said it "was sometimes a struggle to find a simple description that would allow a person to recognize a particular plant and to distinguish it from others that might look similar and with which it might be confused."

I suggest readers who are ardent about plant identification focus on descriptions of plant leaves. Hikers are usually familiar with greenery because it has a distinctive fruit or flower. But frequently plants have no signature fruit or flower, or aren't in their fruiting or blooming stages, so by learning the leaf structure and pattern, the reader will have a superior foundation for year-round plant recognition.

Secure this compact paperback in a strong zipped plastic bag and stick it your backpack. Your interaction with the trail flora will be enriched by education and you can share your knowledge with others.