High Line: A Field Guide and Handbook

Five million people a year visit Manhattan’s elevated High Line park, which is why you might have experienced some jostling the last time you bent down to inspect a particularly interesting specimen of local flora (or fauna).

Next time you visit—and you really should try to get up there for the white dogwoods, which look like a spring snowstorm in April—take a guide. High Line: A Field Guide, created by artist Mike Dion,  is a beautifully illustrated pocket-size companion:

Photography via Tipitin.

Above: A 48-page paperback edition of High Line: A Field Guide and Handbook is £9 from Tipitin.

For US readers, High Line: A Field Guide is $13 from Friends of the High Line.

Above: The book tells the story of the history of the park, a former abandoned elevated rail line that neighborhood activists worked tirelessly to transform into a public space.

Above: Birds, bats, and other inhabitants: their habits (nocturnal and otherwise) are examined in detail.

Above: File this under fauna. Do you a New Yorker who doesn’t keep cockroaches? On the High Line, the keep company with dragonflies.

Above: Here’s a map of the High Line circa 2013 (when the book was published).

For more insider’s tips before you visit, see 10 Garden Ideas to Steal from the High Line in New York.