Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants by Samuel Thayer

Paperback

Samuel Thayer’s second book about wild edible plants. Contains 41 plants (all different than the first book), 512 pages in length, and 512 color pictures.

Nature’s Garden follows the same award-winning format of Samuel Thayer’s first book The Forager’s Harvest with in-depth chapters covering 41 new wild edibles. In this volume you will find the most authoritative accounts of several important food plants, such as hackberry and American lotus, available anywhere. You will find mouth-watering photography of cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries, strawberries, wild plums, and more. You’ll hear of new methods for using dandelions. You’ll finally be able to make sense of the tricky wild lettuce / sow thistle group. You’ll discover that wild carrot and poison hemlock can be reliably told apart, thanks to a detailed chart accompanied by 19 photographs. You’ll read about vegetables with a rich tradition of use around the world that are largely ignored in the wild food literature, such as cow parsnip, patience dock, and honewort. You can read more exciting myth-busting about poisonous plant fables and the maligned black nightshade, plus anecdotes about purple children and the hazards of eating cacti. Yet perhaps the best part of all is the book within a book about acorns: 51 pages of the details that turn these nuts into food.