wild urban plants of the northeast a field guide

The only botany book to explore plant families with a strong medicinal and edible focus. Understanding plant families-and how to identify them-is a huge first step for any forager or self-respecting plant nerd.īooks Our Botanists Use is a great place to start, as it’s an incredibly extensive list of field guides compiled by the USDA Forest Service, suitable for all regions of the United States. These references will help you dive deeper into botanical terms and plant families, and serve as companions (not replacements) to a good regional field guide. If you think there’s a book that deserves to be mentioned but isn’t, please let us know-we’ll continue expanding this guide as new resources become available!

In good conscience, we simply couldn’t list many popular wild food guides in this article, mostly because they don’t emphasize poisonous look-alikes in their plant descriptions, which could mean fatal consequences for foragers using those books. On the other hand, if a more comprehensive course on DIY herbalism is up your alley, take a peek at our Online Herbal Immersion.

Plus, we’ll share our very favorite culinary and medicinal recipes. We’ll give you all the tools you need to explore plant identification, wild food and medicine foraging, and the herbal uses of the most abundant and healing wild plants of the temperate world. We also highly recommend reading our article Sustainably Foraging for Wild Edibles and Herbs.Īnd if all this merely whets your appetite, come join us for our Online Foraging Course: Edible and Medicinal Wild Herbs. We’ve also added sections for Britain, Europe, and Australia!Īs a companion to this list, please check out The Best Books on Foraging Wild Foods and Herbs, which gives you the lowdown on our favorite general foraging books (which pertain to most of temperate North America and Eurasia). The books we’ve featured are fairly specific they dial in on bioregions throughout North America and are tailored to help you safely identify plants and forage wild food and medicine right where you live.

The best are queued up here, and there’s a little something for everyone-from bright-eyed beginners to seasoned foragers and plant enthusiasts. To give you a hand, we cozied up in the Chestnut library and got studious, reviewing all the regional wild food and medicine books we could get our hands on, and checking each one for botanical accuracy and attention to detail. It’s truly important-you might even say a matter of life and death-to make solid choices in this department. There are heaps of books on the subject, and the selection can be dizzying. If you’ve ever felt frustrated trying to choose a reliable field guide to take foraging with you, you’re not alone. Juliet Blankespoor's study, including her 'top shelf' books

Wild urban plants of the northeast a field guide