I decided to stop participating at Gardenweb/Houzz because they've given some robo-Karen access to a particularly insidious form of shadow banning. They can make your post appear to you AND your followers, so it seems as though nothing is amiss to anyone likely to notice and inform you. But no one else on the internet can see it. Very annoying. Looks like it only started in the past several months fortunately. Otherwise I might have gone on posting for years with anything slightly acerbic or (justifiably) critical going into a black hole. I work in IT and peripherally cyber security so it would be hard to fool me, and it was! Anyhow I had a very happy co-incidence recently of buying a used copy of 'Conifers Around the World' that happened to have been Dr. Ronald Lanner's personal copy. He was a noted conifer expert and professor at the University of Utah, who, btw, happened to post years ago on gardenweb as pinetree30 IIRC. It contained a few pages of notes, some of which I'm posting here for posterity. I got permission from his family btw.
A book (pair of books!) I never managed to get, unfortunately - wish they'd reprint them at a less extortionate price!
Yep, I waffled about buying it for years, and kind of wish I had pre-ordered it back in 2010. IIRC the price went up when it was finally printed. When I spotted a copy on amazon at the 'original' pre order price of $250, I pounced. I wonder if it would have been more sensible for them to print in North America, where the market was potentially larger, and then not have to pay shipping into the US. My broad understanding and experience is that shipping things out of the USA is usually cheaper than shipping out of many other countries, just because of economies of scale. (which is why shipping out of China is cheapest of all!) But I guess it was a matter of Hungarian national pride or whatnot to have it printed there. Here was one more set of notes, harder to interpret than the first, I thought I'd include for posterity.
I see Ron's picking up on a discrepancy of treatment there between different Abies in western North America! My preference is to treat them both as subspecies: Abies lasiocarpa subsp. arizonica, Abies concolor subsp. lowiana. But that's anathema to the forestry/botanical establishment in the region...
