Customer Reviews

Field guide to edible wild plants

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

 

 

And still ok if you're clueless. The book's small size, a convenience in the field, limits the amount of illustrations it can contain. For example, the entire gooseberry/currant family is represented by three pictures, all fitting on one page. The text, on the other hand, can't be matched. My suggestion would be to pair this book with a field guide to wild plants until you can recognise them by sight.

I have long owned the earlier edition and excitedly bought this new one. This book is a good idea but poorly executed. (Let me say right away that I am the author of an edible plant book, so you can accuse me of bashing the competition if you want.) The older edition was one of the books that helped get me interested in this topic, and it is sentimental to me, so I keep trying to like this book but find it difficult.

While it does contain a lot of good information and covers an excellent selection of species, it is also full of inaccuracies - and how can a reader know what to trust? Out of the dozens of edible plant books I have, this is one of the least accurate and I believe is based on comparatively little first-hand experience. The misinformation and omissions are too numerous to list, but here are a few examples:

Jack-in-the-pulpit and skunk cabbage cannot be simply dried to eliminate their calcium oxalate. Believing this would be potentially dangerous, and painful at best. They require prolonged extreme dessication under hot conditions (I have some of both kinds that have been drying for 8 years and still have calcium oxalate a-plenty), or prolonged baking (days or weeks). Also, the book does not even mention that eastern and western skunk cabbage are completely different plants, nor does it specify which one it is talking about. The documentation of their food uses differs.

The drawing of arrowhead tubers looks so dramatically unlike the real thing that you would never know if you found them. The jerusalem artichoke tubers depicted are a cultivated form, which looks and tastes quite different from the typical wild type.

This book is not very good for identification and doesn't even use the scientific names of the plants. The preparation sections are typically 1-3 sentences - not much at all. Much of the text seems like space filler, although it is a good read.

All of the info in this book is easy to find in other books - the author doesn't seem to contribute anything to this field. If you have this book, keep it and refer to it. If you are considering getting into foraging, don't make it a priority. Depending on your location, check out Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, Steve Brill's wild food book, Abundantly Wild (Midwest), The Euell Gibbons books, or Nancy Turner's books for the Pacific NW. These are all much better. Get a tree, shrub, and wildflower guide to your specific region for ID.

This book is very interesting with nice pictures but should not be used as a primary source in the field. In my opinion, it gives a false sense of security by failing to mention poisonous plants that appear similar to those highlighted. Also, it does not pay particular attention to precise plant identification and therefore should not be used for this purpose. Overall, I have enjoyed this book immensely, but would recommend it with caution.

This book is a catalog of mostly uncultivated plants that are edible or have medicinal purposes. The entries are arranged alphabetically by common name, so there is no key system- -if you're looking at a plant and you don't already know it's name, you'll have to leaf through every page of the book to see if it's there. For each entry, there is a short article that provides other names for the plant, and description, distribution, and information about uses. There is also an idealized color illustration of the plant to aid identification. The description sections are not consistent in the types of information that they provide- -some descriptions cover the plant, the fruit, or the flowers, while others cover history, varieties, and more distribution information. The uses section tells us which parts of the plant can be consumed, and how they must be prepared to eliminate any toxins that might be present.

I was quite excited after reading the introduction to this book- -wow! So many plants are out there in the forest just waiting for those in the know to come by and eat them. Why plant a garden? But as I read the entries for each individual plant, I began to recognize that it would be hard to get your sole nutrition from the wild plants mentioned here. A great many of the plants are leafy greens, that are too bitter or too toxic to eat without at least soaking and often boiling, possibly several times. That got me wondering about how much nutrition could be left in a plate of well boiled wild greens, if we are cautioned not to cook cultivated greens in a similar manner because all the vitamins will be washed away. If you have to boil the heck out of these things to make them edible, wouldn't you be better off with greens that have been cultivated for thousands of years to be tender enough to consume them raw, straight out of the garden? In addition to the leafy greens, Angier includes a few fruits like blueberries and cranberries (the illustration for blueberry leaves is like none I've ever seen in the wild before), some trees like maples and others where you can eat the inner bark lining (hopefully without killing too many trees), and some edible tubers. The descriptions of the edible tubers seem the most promising, nutritionally. Overall, I found this book an interesting read as well as somewhat informative, but I think I will keep on gardening after all.

I find this one useful. Drawings are not "natural" but compensate by revealing all major parts clearly: root, leaf, flower, stems. Anyway, I find one needs at least two books for reliable identity and often for any ID at all. Variations among species make identity of individual plants a lot harder than it might seem, excepting for a few easy plants like cat tails, purslane, etc. I agree with a prior reviewer that absence of poisonous plants is unfortunate. Also, absence of scientific names is not good, since common names aren't reliable.

This is an interesting guide with lots of good illustrations and detailed descriptions of the plants. But I would never dare to eat any of the plants because the book does not explain whether the edible plants could easily be confused with possibly toxic plants, it does not explain clearly enough how the edible plants should be cooked, and in some places I even question the given advice. For example, we always grew our own elderberries and were taught that the berries should never be eaten raw. They must be cooked. Anger says that the raw berries may not taste good but can be eaten raw. Is he right? I would rather trust my grandmother who grew up poor and often depended on wild plants.

Then I checked another plant I knew well, namely arrowhead. It grows wild in the wetland area of my garden. I had never checked the tubers before but now I did. They grow deep down in oxygen-deprived soil that smells horrible when disturbed. I am not sure I want to eat this plant raw, as the author suggests. In fact, the Peterson Field Guide on edible plants says that the tubers have an unpleasant taste when eaten raw, but taste delicious when cooked.

If you are just interested in knowing which plants can be eaten, this book is quite good. If you actually want to eat some of the plants, also buy the Peterson Field Guide "Edible Wild PLants." While Angier has better illustrations, Peterson has better cooking descriptions.

I owned this before and I remember it seeming more durable but it is well written.

This book first caught my attention in the 70s but over the years I had lost my original copy so I repurchased one. It is still a good book even though the pictures are all rendered as art, which makes me a little nervous on critical IDs. I enjoy the details on preparing the plants, some of which were apparently as the native Americans had done. It is a very good companion book to some of the more recent works out there such as the North American Guide to Edible Wild Plants.

I am very pleased with this book. It is very thorough, and very easy to get the information needed. Includes alternate names, how each was used in history (natives, pilgrims, etc.), as well as how to prepare and use. Some even warn against including too much of an item in your diet! Can't say enough about this book. Terrific!

The Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants is a good book to have on your shelf if you are interested in if you want to know what wild plants are edible. The book does discuss many different types of plants that grow out in the wild. The Field Guide does a good job of discussing where to find the plants, how and when to harvest, and a general guide of preparing the food. Where I find this book lacking is that there are no actual pictures of the plants in question. Before I chose to eat something out in the wild I want to be doubley sure I am picking the right plant. So I do feel it is a good guide and filled with information, I wished some time could have been spent on photography for my personal piece of mind.