Edible Wild Plants - Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate.Volume 1
by John Kallas
OK, this is my own book. So instead of giving you a review here I will send you to a page that shows what other authors who have read it are saying. This web site has three pages devoted to the book:
—Overview (What's the book about / intend to accomplish)
—Features (Shows how function and design work together to maximize learning)
—Reviews (What other authors are saying about the book)

Authors Position:
I designed this book to do what I always wanted wild food books to do for me as a student: teach me something that I can actually apply, help me identify edible plants at any stage of their growth, give me close up full color photographs of the edible parts at the optimal stages of growth, and show me something fun and tasty to do with it. It lays a foundation and covers plants you are likely to come across on a daily basis. It covers those plants in the kind of detail that you need to genuinely know and understand them. It clarifies and explains concepts poorly understood and commonly mis-represented in the wild food literature. Compare my coverage of any plant in the book side-by-side to that same plant in any other book ever written. That comparison will reveal the value of this book, and represents what I will continue to do in future books.
Edible Wild Plants - Wild Foods From Dirt to Plate is the first volume of a series of books designed to take you further, faster than any book ever pubished on wild foods. Due to extensive well planned photographs, and whole chapters devoted to individual plants, you will recognize many edibles already growing in your yard, garden, and neighborhood that you may have been admiring or pulling your whole life; without a clue of edibility. These are wild foods that you could be incorporating into your daily diet —they are not rare or hard to find plants. Plants covered are readily available to most North Americans and most Europeans.
Reading Edible Wild Plants - Wild Foods From Dirt to Plate will make your life as a forager, more successful and more fun due to its extensive content, user friendly design, and sheer beauty.  While no book stands alone, this is an important part of any serious forager's wild food library. It was designed to be the first book you use as the foundation of your collection—read it to see if I am right. Highly recommended by other authors.
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The Forager's Harvest - A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
by Samuel Thayer
An important book for a wild food library. Imagine a wild food book whose author actually has lots of experience with the plants he talks about!  And on top of this he is creative and practical  -  solving problems one might encounter gathering and making these plants into food.  Welcome to Sam's world.  Like Euell Gibbons, Sam devotes a revealing and memorable chapter to each plant, contributing lots of new and useful information.  Going beyond Euell, he illustrates his book with lots of photographs. 
The first 77 pages cover conceptual ideas such as Sam's view of the history of wild foods with comments on the past literature, getting started as a forager, plant identification, general harvest and preparation methods, a review of some tools he uses, and a useful explanation of canning and other storage methods. There is a Harvest Calendar that is very useful if you are in the upper Midwest, but might confuse readers from other parts of North America.
The plant focused chapters are excellent. Sam provides useful detail on the foods generated from each plant. Detail he provides is based on experience. He includes an average of five to six photographs per plant with a range of three, like for sheep sorrel, to a maximum of 15, for wapato. This is far more than most other books (the book above is the only one with more) and the benefits are obvious. This book could also be listed in the plant identification category for its photographs alone.
50% of the plants covered are found in eastern or northeastern North America. Another 50% can be found just about anywhere in North America except for the desert, the Everglades, and higher elevations.
Reading The Forager's Harvest will make your life as a forager, more successful and more fun.  While no book stands alone, Sam's The Forager's Harvest is an important part of any serious forager's wild food library. Highly recommended.
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Nature's Garden - A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
by Samuel Thayer
An important book for a wild food library. I wish I had Sam's books when I was first getting started with wild foods—my life would have been easier. He has continued to produce some great work and good coverage of a wide variety of plants. At 512 pages Naure's Garden is a great value.
One of the reasons I love Sam's books is that we think alike, have recognized many of the same problems in the wild food literature, and have similar solutions to problems we encounter. That is a good thing. If two dedicated wild food researchers and prectitioners separated by almost 2,000 miles and 20 years in age independently agree on so much, then you know that there is some reliability in what we are saying. What is scary is that I almost had the exact same title for my book (Nature's Garden), that would have been released within a month of this one. So I am happy I changed it for that and other reasons.
Like Sam's Forager's Harvest book, he provides plant focused chapters with great detail on identification and the foods generated from each plant. Detail he provides is based on experience. This book could also be listed in the plant identification category for its photographs alone. The non-plant chapters provide some valuable information—wisdom, so to speak. I particularly liked his account of "One Month Eating Wild". His experience has a lot to teach those thinking about living off of wild foods—a common fantacy of us testosterone poisoned males.
Sam covers plants that no one has really covered well before. His American lotus and black nightshade chapters were just fun for me to read, even as a seasoned professional. And I love the foods he's generated with acorns. His acorn chapter alone could be a small book at 51 pages.
Reading The Forager's Harvest will make your life as a forager, more successful and more fun.  While no book stands alone, Sam's Nature's Garden is an important part of any serious forager's wild food library. Highly recommended.
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Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. 1962, 303 pages, lots of plants covered, Amazon has 11 sample pages.
Stalking the Healthful Herbs by Euell Gibbons. 1966, 301 pages, lots of plants covered, Amazon has 9 sample pages.
Stalking the Blue-eyed Scallop by Euell Gibbons. 1964, 164 pages, lots of seashore creatures covered, 18 sample pages.

Gibbons books are an important component of any great wild food library. In some ways Gibbons books have been usurped by the first three books at the top of this list of great books —the new generation. But in other ways and in some areas Gibbons research, experimentation, and play will always be worth reading. He reports knowledge based on experience. When I can't find information elsewhere, I check to see what Gibbons did. The ingenuity of his 'vegetarian mayapple chiffon pie incorporating whipped mallow will amaze and inspire you. While I often recommend his books to anyone interested in wild foods, keep in mind that, except for the Scallop book, these are not field guides. His first two books have an occasional good line drawing, but you must 'know' the plant before the rich detail that he gives will do you any good.
Euell's books are written in an informal folksy style that is endearing. Gibbons work has been so valuable over the years that he has become one of the most plagiarized wild food authors. Read Gibbons then read other authors. You will see his experiences and recipes repeated over and over again in subsequent books, often without giving him credit. His books inspire your interest in wild foods and help you to figure out what to do once you get a wild food into your kitchen. About half the content of his books cover plants exclusive to the Eastern half of North America, the other half (or closely related plants) grow across most of North America.
Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Stalking the Healthful Herbs are similar in the way they cover plants. Edibility is the predominant topic for both books, with mild medicinal uses covered secondarily. When discussing 'healthful herbs' his focus is not on treating major diseases, but reporting on his research and experimentation into gentle home remedy aspects of the plants he covers. Lots of teas and salves.
*Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop is different from the other two books because it focuses primarily on seashore animals of the eastern seaboard. Gibbons covers crabs, clams, mussels, sea urchins, seaweeds and a few seashore land-based edibles in a wonderful kind of detail. As in his other books, he reports knowledge based on experience. Gibbons does this like an effortless walk through life, journalling his interesting story filled with research and discovery. There are a fair number of good line drawings that are useful in combination with other photograph-based guides. Scallop, like his other two books is written in an informal folksy style that is endearing.
The best uses of this book are to inspire your interest in wild foods, get you out into the coast, and to guide you once you get back to kitchen or campfire. Most of the focus is on eastern species, but quite a bit of it can apply to the west. All three of these books are recommended to add some depth to your wild food library! For more on Gibbons, read his biography at this site.

Wild Seasons - Gathering and Cooking Wild Plants of the Great Plains
by Kay Young
There are books that cover the east, books that cover the west, and Young's book here which covers everything in between. The range of this book spans the area bordered by the Rocky Mountains in the west to the deciduous forests of the east, the Texas panhandle in the south to the north in Canada. The actual range of this book goes far beyond the Great Plains. 80% of the plants in this book are found in eastern North America, 25% are found to the west of the Rockies, and perhaps 15% are found in the dry Southwest.
This book could have just as appropriately been in our cookbook section due to its 250 good quality recipes. Kay covers 52 plants sharing many insights and experiences along the way. She is a botanist, naturalist, folklorist, and wild food educator. Each two to seven page chapter starts out with high quality line drawings by Mark Marcuson that clearly depict the spirit of the plant covered. These illustrations will help in identification, but should be supplemented by plant identification guides.
Following the illustrations Kay systematically provides a mildly technical description of the plant, its distribution (range), its habitat, edible parts, seasons to collect, cautions, additional information, and recipes. This 'additional information' is where this book shines. Kay shares real life experiences learning about, finding, gathering, and preparing the plants for use in her dishes. There is often really good detail here. Following that are one to seven recipes using that plant as an ingredient.
Like Bill Beatty's book (see cookbook section) Young's recipe titles are simple (non pretentious) and straight-forward like "Traditional Gooseberry Pie", "Creamed Lambsquarters with Mushrooms", "Cooked Wood Nettle Salad", and "Sandcherry Jam". Highly Recommended as part of your wild food library - Essential for anyone in the Great Plains areas of North America, and valuable just about anywhere else.
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The Neighborhood Forager - A Guide for the Wild Food Gourmet
by Robert Henderson
An important book for a wild food library. No matter where you are in North America, you could benefit from this book. I like Henderson's approach and perspective. He covers the kinds of wild and landscaped foods you can forage in the typical older neighborhood anywhere in North America. He includes major edible weeds as well as many native ornamentals that produce edible parts.
Why are these particular foods important? Because they are a walk away from your house. Because you can watch them develop throughout the seasons and get a feel for how nature is feeding you while you are learning and feeding from it. Not only that, your neighbors will love you for gathering the butternuts that would otherwise clog up their lawn mower! There are 20 good line drawings, 59 mostly very poor black and white photographs (quality suffers when, to keep printing costs down, you convert color photographs to black and white) supplemented by 23 high quality color photographs in the books center.
At the end of each chapter, Henderson offers recipes, 37 in all, to help us enjoy our harvest. Foods from trees are covered to a degree that I haven't seen before. Great detail is given with an honest approach making this book valuable. What is lacking are photographs that would 'demonstrate' some of that detail for the novice forager. But this problem is endemic for virtually all wild food books. Recommended as a part of a wild food library!
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Field Guide to North American Edible Wild Plants
by Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman
An important book for any wild food library. This is a valuable resource that focuses on both the identification as well as the uses of edible wild plants. Elias and Dykeman cover 220 plants, of which 20 are poisonous. Each plant they cover is represented by a range map and one to four full color photographs to help you recognize the plants they included. The book organizes plants into seasons.
The introduction covers topics that include harvest and preparation, jam jelly and pie recipes, and Native American uses of plants. This book covers herbs, shrubs, trees, and vines. There is a nutrient table at the end of the book. The photographs are well done. In many instances they will help you identify plants down to the species level. Edibility coverage is brief but information rich. One of the things I really like is that they include "tips", on how to harvest process and cook, that they learned from experience. Recommended as a part of your wild food library!
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Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild and Not So Wild Places
by Steve Brill
An important book for a wild food library. "Wildman" Steve Brill was made famous when he was arrested in Central Park for pulling weeds to teach people about edible wild plants. He eventually went on to be a Park Naturalist for a while and published this book on wild foods. Like others in this section, this book is good because Steve is knowledgeable, honest, and speaks from experience. He explains a lot about each plant, tells you what he used it for, and how he prepared it. He gives you valuable tips, tells you what worked for him and what did not.
This is not a field guide for 'identifying' the plants. The line drawings by illustrator Evelyn Dean show an interesting style, but are not my cup of tea. Illustration detail is more arty than helpful to a person who does not already know the plants. Steve's book is divided into "season" chapters which are further divided into plants found in different habitats. The Table of Contents is so vast as to be unhelpful - just go right to the index. The book ends with tips on how to work with wild foods in the kitchen and a whole chapter of intriguing recipes. Recommended as a part of a wild food library!
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Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains
by H.D. Harrington
An important book for any wild food library. Essential if you are from the Rocky Mountains. In fact, no matter where you are in North America, you could benefit from this book. About 1/3 of the plants are unique to the US Rocky Mountains, about 1/3 apply to anywhere west of the Rockies, and about 1/3 are found anywhere in North America. The reason this book is so good is that Harrington is knowledgeable and honest. He explains a lot about each plant, tells you what he used it for, and how he prepared it. He gives you valuable tips, tells you what worked for him and what did not.
This is not a field guide for 'identifying' the plants. The line drawings by illustrator Y. Matsumura are technically excellent, but like other books with line drawings, only help if they are supplemented by good photographs. This book has a significant chapter on poisonous plants, which are usually short shrifted by other books. Other chapters are titled "Potherbs", "Young Shoots", "Salads", "Roots and Underground Parts", "Fleshy Fruits", "Non-fleshy Fruits and Seeds", and "Miscellaneous - Beverages, Flavors, Smoking, Nibbles, Etc.". Recommended as a part of a wild food library!
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Edible and Useful Plants of California
by Charlotte Bringle Clarke
An important book for a wild food library. Essential if you are from the Southwestern United States. After Gibbons seminal works from 1962 - 1966 many people were inspired to learn and then write about wild foods. Of the many books coming out in the 70's, Clarke's stood out. Covering 200 plants, having 46 color photos, and many fairly accurate line drawings, the book tells us of Native American uses, and plant lore in a clear and concise way.
For most plants, she gives a recipe or two based on today's sensibilities, with titles you might see in a modern cookbook. For instance "One Crust Salal Pie", "Scalloped Squaw Cabbage", and "Creamed Plantain Soup". Plants are organized by habitat communities. So all desert plants will be together. Other groupings include wetland plants, Foothill and mountains, Urban and cultivated areas, and ornamentals. And while this organization is typical of field guides, this is not really a field guide for 'identifying' plants.
Readers from other parts of North America will benefit from the plants she covers in her urban and cultivated areas category. Fifty percent of her plants are found throughout the west. Recommended as a part of a wild food library!
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The Flavors of Home: A Guide to Wild Edible Plants of the San Francisco Bay Area
by Margit Roos-Collins
An important book for any wild food library. Essential if you are from the western coast. In fact, no matter where you are in North America, you could benefit from this book. There is even a really good twenty-five page section on pacific coast sea vegetables. The reason this book is so good is that Margit is knowledgeable and honest. She explains a lot about each plant, tells you what she used it for, and how she prepared it. She gives you valuable tips, tells you what worked for her and what did not. She
Margit even has a section called "Greens I Have Given Up Trying to Like". And while everyone has their own taste sensibilities, it is refreshing to hear something real. This is not a field guide for 'identifying' the plants. The line drawings by illustrator Rose Craig are often quite good, but like other books with line drawings, only help if they are supplemented by good photographs. Other chapter titles include, "Poisonous Plants", "Edible Blossoms", "Berries", "Nuts", "Greens and Other Vegetables", "Mushrooms and Mushrooming", "Teas, Seasonings, and Medicinal Plants", and "Trail Nibbles". Recommended as a part of a wild food library!
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Wild Food Adventurer
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For the most in-depth coverage
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check the index on our
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Among other things,
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