The Piedmont is Virginia’s largest physiographic province, covering 38% of the state between the Coastal Plain to the east and the Appalachians to the west. Lacking the topographic diversity of the mountains and the wetland diversity of the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont has received less attention historically from ecologists and botanists. This is particularly true of the central Piedmont, on which most ecological and botanical work has been done only since the 1960s. The author has conducted studies of both the area’s plant communities and its flora for a period of 35 years, building on the earlier work of other ecologists and botanists. The work has included study of the physiographic, geological, and historical land use of the region; the quantitative sampling of the best remaining natural communities; and the collection of more than 4300 vascular-plant specimens representing 2455 new county records, 172 central Piedmont records, and 5 Virginia state records. In addition, extensive herbarium research into other collections from the area have been undertaken. These studies have resulted in a formal classification of 24 ecological community types and the documentation of 1975 vascular species or infraspecific taxa. A global biogeographic analysis of the central Piedmont flora, as well as analyses of its regional relationships within Virginia, are also provided.

                        There are few published studies of the Virginia Piedmont’s vegetation and flora, and none of this magnitude and duration. The treatment is intermediate in scope between the site-, watershed-, or county-scale floras that are the most typically published and a state-level flora such as the Flora of Virginia (Weakley et al. 2012). Encompassing 10 counties and covering about 9400 km², the study area is small enough to be ecologically cohesive yet large enough to capture many of the gradients and transitions in vegetation types and species distributions that occur both from south to north and from east to west in the province.

                        The manuscript strongly emphasizes the relationship of the flora to regional vegetation patterns and environmental influences imposed by climate, geology, topography, soils, and human activities. In addition to a detailed annotated list of vascular plants, the book includes a classification and description of the natural communities in which many of the native species occur, as well as a comparison of the central Piedmont flora with that of the adjacent Coastal Plain and Appalachians. In addition to the book’s high scientific standards, the inclusion of common plant names, a glossary of technical terms, and numerous photographs will help make its contents accessible to amateur botanists, naturalists, and horticulturists.