Customer Reviews

Field Guide to Medicinal Wild Plants

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you think that you're going to hike into the wilderness and learn to identify medicinal plants with this book, you may be in for a surprise. There is no index except for the list of common names in the front. An index with the Latin names as well as the pathological conditions the plants are useful for would have been helpful. There also seems to be no logic (except maybe to the author)to the order of the plants presented. It would be quite difficult for you to identify a plant with this book unless you already had some guess as to what you were looking at, and then look THAT up. A more descriptive title would have been just plain "Medicinal Wild Plants of North America."(i.e. nix the "Field Guide" part because, that it certainly ain't!) Having said that, I think the book is worth reading just for the information you get from it. I certainly learned a lot about how the plants were used from a historical perspective (lots of anecdotes about the native Americans and their herbal medicines).

A full page is dedicated to each plant, showing in color, a detailed drawing of the leaves and flower, fruit or other identifying characteristic. The text is at least a page and covers: Family, Common Names, Characteristics, Area and Uses. The text is easy to read and offers interesting notes about the plant's uses, primarily from American Indians and pioneers. This is not a field identification book, but it provides additional information to a known plant. The guide is alphabetical by common name.

I got this book in hopes of helping myself naturaly. I have found it very informative and now use some of the plants every day to hopfully stay healthy. I'm glad that I got it and was very satisfied with my purchese

This book is really great. Let's say that you fell on a rock and your kne cracked open and it's bloody, well this book will tell you plnts that you kneed to put on it. If you have to mix some plants or liquify them to a certain point it tells you exactly how to prepare it so that it will have effect. I highly recomend this book for anybody who goes into the woods and has a chance of getting hurt.

This book is great because it covers plants in my backyard and geographical location and not in some far away location I'm not going to visit to collect plants. The pictures are good and you can easily recognize plants from them. The book gives an over-all usage of the plant, if not a lot of detail about how it's processed for use. Over all, I have identified a few plants in my backyard that I haven't found in other books. I'm not mowing my weeds until I identify all of them. I will definitely not spray weeds again now that I know how useful they are.