The information collected was mainly west of the great divide, but not limited to the West. Over half of our lives was spent in California, from San Diego county- north. We lived in six distinctly different locations and climates from the sea shore, to desert, to mountainous. For twenty years we were twenty minutes from a ski lift on a ten thousand foot high peak. The view from our rural place in Oregon showed fourteen-thousand foot peaks of the Cascade range.
Previous to digital cameras, we stored several thousand plant negatives, truly grateful for the arrival of scanners, megabyte storage and still confounded by gigabyte media. An undiscovered leak in our storage area ruined over 3,000 negatives. The five or six hundred CDs we have now stores the wide variety of photographs found in our books, 3,000 of which are in the Incredible Edible Series. Until photopaint software took over the task, our darkroom was frequently occupied. Several years ago, I sold our 4 X5 view camera and its press graphic cousin. Our first cameras had accessory lenses that we ground at the beginning of our sixty years together.
She consulted every plant book source we could find. Fern lists, for example, the seed viability range from all sources as well as the consensus in years. The same information is included for germination time, soaking and other pretreatment, the country or location of origin, Latin, common , and foreign names, as well as how to prepare the edible parts for eating. A cross-reference listing of plant sources for seeds and cuttings is also provided in each book.
Volume 1 is a field reference handbook to have in the field when identifying plants. 961 plants are identified, with 304 color illustrations, mainly photographs, on 493 pages in the two volumes.
Volume 2 is reference information valuable for propagation along with a cross reference of sources for availability of the plants identified in volume 1. There are no plant illustrations in volume 2.
