Customer Reviews

Guide to Wild Foods and Useful Plants

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

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Nyerges's book is weak on its photos and plant identification but is excellent as a companion book to all those boring plant ID texts. His book provides excellent background and practical information from someone who has actually used these plants. While geared for California, many of the plants are found across the U.S. especially in the West.

I concur with the review of Hawkeye. I will add that the book has a glossary which can be helpful at times, especially for the beginner. It also has an appendix of "Safe Families" which is unique and gives one a good place to focus your research if you are concerned about misidentification. Book is full of useful tidbits most of which are included in the "edible properties", "medicinal uses" and "other uses" category. The pictures and the plant descriptions are lacking. Apparently no one reviewed the book carefully because the author states in the introduction while speaking of being a responsible forager "We may put tobacco or mulch under the plant, or we may just breathe on it so that it can inhale our carbon monoxide." Carbon monoxide is what comes from car exhaust and carbon dioxide is what we exhale that plants use to make sugars...their food! Maybe an honest mistake but a disappointing statement when you would expect the author to have a good understanding of the inner workings of plants. I am not trying to bash the book or the author, one should look past this and I still feel that the book is useful for what it is and there are things to be learned with the information it contains.

This is a great wild plant guide for use in Boy Scout outings! All of the major species are covered as well as other more common edible and poisonous plants. I highly reccomend this book as well as other Christopher Nyerges books for Boy Scouts and Boy Scout Leaders

If you buy this book, and if you intend to actually go foraging for wild foods, you will need to buy a good plant identification book for your area to go with it. Though the information is fairly comprehensive, this book has only small black-and-white photographs, many of which are so blurry and dark that attempts at visual identification would be guessing at best.

There are two small pictorial keys in the front of the book--one of leaf shapes, and one of fruit and seeds--to assist where the photographs fail. The author also describes the physical characteristics of each plant according to: overall shape and size; leaf type; flowers; and fruits. He then lists: edible properties; medicinal uses; detrimental properties; where the plant is found; its growing cycle; and its lore and signature. There are a few recipes. There is also an appendix of Safe Families of non-toxic and primarily edible plants; a glossary; and a bibliography. Overall, quite a compendium of information.

There are about 70 plants gathered here. Though the book is geared for the California area, at least half of these plants grow where I live, in Washington State, as well. I found the entire book to be interesting reading, though I was a little disappointed that the harvesting and preparing directions were sometimes sketchy. Nevertheless, the author has been working with these plants for 30 years and his firsthand experiences are helpful and noteworthy.

This is a good addition to a wild plants library, but you will definitely need other books, with better photographs and deeper preparation instructions, to supplement this information if you plan to use these plants for food or medicine.

The Guide to Wild foods and Useful Plants provided me with the infomation I was hoping for. I am using the book to a reference for my Senior Project. It is a good book to have if you what to live off the land.

I heard the author interviewed by Jill Cloutier on Sustainable World Radio (highly recommended), and I was very favorably impressed.
So I bought the book. I think the verbal content is good (I haven't gotten to the part mentioned in the earlier review where the author apparently confuses carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide), but there are two problems with this book:

1) the pictures are in black and white. For a book intended to educate its readers to identify possible plants to eat, I think this is a major shortcoming.

2) the book has no index. This is a grievous omission. If this is the publisher's doing, then the author should find another publisher for his work. A reference book like this should not be without an index. Truth in packaging: How many people would buy this book if in the description of it in the catalog it said, "Has no index." ?

So color me disappointed.

The publisher has a PDF format version of the book, but there's no indication that that version contains color photos. Since the author apparently owns the photos here's a suggestion for him: compress the color photos into a ZIP file and offer it for free on his web page for readers to download.

I was very disappointed with this book. I expected a comprehensive description and pictures of plants, instead I got one persons "non expert" opinion and black and white poor quality photos.
I certainly would not have bought this book if I had any idea it was as poorly put together as it is.

I have reviewed all the plant books. This one was one of the most useful and well organized books on edibles that I have found.

This book has really good easy to read info about plants in it.A must for the survivalist

This book has a comprehensive description of many plants as well as many black and white pictures. I'm sure it would satisfy the most curious researcher.