Botanical experts Foster and Duke have updated this beloved guide to include more than 500 useful medicinal plants found in east and central North America. There is another guide covering the western half of the continent. These compact foraging guides make a nice companion to the herbal-focused foraging books above, a good choice for foraging expeditions covering more plants than they do, but in less detail. I hope these suggestions help you find the best books on foraging for your next wild food adventure! Likes banks, woods, gardens and walls. Purple flowers with lighter stripes on petals. Whole plant may sometimes turn red.

Jared:… how can learn what these plants really need and harvest some of those seeds every fall and bring them to another suitable habitat and understand their habitat and understand them well enough to know what that is? So I think there’s this whole process of discovery here. There’s discovering this really delicious gourmet food, and then there’s discovering the personality of somebody else in our community, in this case, a plant being in our community, that needs our help. So for instance, in the spring, wild ramps is probably the most popular example, besides some of the mushrooms and so forth. And so where I am, rural New York State, Hudson Valley, everybody goes into the woods and takes all the wild ramps, and that worries me. And so you are advocating a little more about we could actually grow them if we understood how, right? There’s not necessarily—maybe there is for ramps—but for a lot of these native plants, there’s not a manual. They’re not in the plant horticulture books that tell you how to grow this [laughter]. Sussex Botanical Recording Society has a Plant of the Week feature which includes ID tips: https://www.sussexflora.org.uk/ Margaret: Because, boy oh boy, is that an astringent fruit. And even the elderberries, the timing is everything with the elderberries, right? Even as common as that is, and you see the birds going wild on it. But for us, it’s a useful plant, but timing is everything. So again, you have to do your homework. You have to become intimately knowledgeable, study these creatures not only to ID them but to potentially engage with them in terms of using them in any way, I think. Jared Rosenbaum: Sure. So we’re a native plant nursery. We’re in North Central New Jersey. We grow native plant species from seed that we collect in local natural areas. We have a bit of a focus on forest understory herbs and upland meadow plants, and also have always had a strong interest in those plants that have a long cultural relationship with people, so edible native plants, medicinal native plants, and those used in various crafts as well.

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Once you’ve discovered the bounty of foraged foods around you, it’s time to branch out from adding them to salads, soups, and smoothies and have some fun. As interest in exploring delicious wild foods has grown, more enticing cookbooks have come out that offer innovative ways to use your foraged finds. These books will inspire many wild food experiments. The New Wildcrafted Cuisine by Pascal Baudar Even after you’ve taken classes, you’ll want some good books on foraging to consult from time to time, either to remind yourself of a plant you haven’t seen in awhile, or to help you explore new plants or identify those you don’t already know. I love flipping through the larger books to learn about plants I don’t yet have in my foraging repertoire. For garden designers, RHS Plant Finder offers an indispensable list of ingredients, while horticultural writers use it for reference.” Originally compiled by Chris Philip and his partner Denys Gueroult, who were looking for interesting plants to grow in their garden and recording what nursery was selling what selection, the original Plant Finder listed 22,000 plants. Since then, the book has grown in terms of the plant groups it covers, its comprehensiveness and the number of genera, species and cultivars that are included.

Very abundant on waste ground as well as on heaths and in hedgerows and woodland. Thorny shrub with white or pale pink flowers. Common in grass and roadside verges. Bright blue flower with a white eye on a sprawling stem. Leaves oval and toothed. For images of, and information on, 800+ Irish wildflowers (flowering times, ID tips and distribution in Ireland), try Irish Wildflowers.Abundant on disturbed ground, verges and railways. Produces tall spires of purplish flowers. Often found in dense stands. An expert forager, Thayer gives extensive (and often very entertaining) descriptions of some of the most common wild foods you can find in North America, including milkweed, cattails, knotweed, and violets. In addition to identification, he covers how and when to harvest and how best to use them. Color photos help guide foragers through key identifying features and how to differentiate plants from potentially poisonous look-alikes. I’ve been foraging the edible weeds in my yard for years now and love knowing that a basic familiarity with edible wild plants means I can supplement our produce supply with lots of exciting wild greens and edible flowers. It’s a great way to eat seasonally, and it helps us get all sorts of valuable plant compounds we wouldn’t otherwise. So if there’s plants missing from that community, what are the missing elements here? And sometimes they’re disturbances like wildfire. And sometimes they’re missing animal species, like large carnivores. Sam Thayer's Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America by Samuel Thayer

Margaret: One of the things about the… I hate to use a word like useful, because that’s obviously not what I mean, because they’re useful in such deeper ways, but the plants that we could utilize as foodstuffs or medicines or whatever, or, as you say, in crafting, that… Orchid-lover Richard @thenewgalaxy has put together some orchid ID/ info sheets - there's an example below right and more available from @wildflower_hour. And what we’re discovering is just because there’s not a lot of ramps around, doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a lot of ramps. Arora has a more compact foraging guide to a smaller number of mushroom species called All That the Rain Promises and More for taking along on foraging expeditions. COOKBOOKS FOCUSING ON FORAGED FOODS Organized by season, this The New Wildcrafted Cuisine goes beyond recipes to explain techniques like preserving, fermenting, and how to cook with bark and sap, and how to make wild hot sauce, jam, and cheese. Baudar also explores how to use insects and how to create unique herb blends using ingredients found on forest floors.Baudar also has a book on fermenting wildcrafted ingredients and one on wildcrafted brewing. Forage, Harvest, Feast by Marie Viljoen The solution: Get a big foraging guide and at least one of the more detailed guides. If I were just starting a foraging book collection, I’d begin with Steve Brill’s Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants and one of Thayer’s foraging guides, or perhaps Wild Remedies by herbalists Rosalee de la Forêt and Emily Han. Flipping through Brill’s guide will boggle the new forager’s mind with hundreds of wild plants most of us don’t realize are edible. I have turned to Thayer’s books over and over again through the years, but this one will keep me busy for the rest of my life. Plus if you don’t find straight up plant information enough entertainment, Thayer’s irrepressible humor shines through often. You will especially enjoy “The Best Index,” different from the *Regular Old Boring Index* (his words) which includes helpful categories about which are the best greens to fry versus eat in a salad, which make the best survival foods, and my favorites, the best things to feed a first date and the best things to avoid feeding a first date.