United States
£ GBP
A recent rise in the popularity of urban farming, farmers' markets, and foraging from nature means more people are looking for information about plants. In The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants, botanists Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins coach you on how to safely identify, gather, and prepare delicious dishes from readily available plants – and clearly indicate which ones to avoid.
More than 200 color illustrations, accompanied by detailed descriptions, will help you recognize edible plants such as nettles, daylilies, panic grass, and tearthumbs. For decades, Musselman and Wiggins have taught courses on how to prepare local plants, and their field-to-table recipes require only a few easily found ingredients. They offer instructions for making garlic powder out of field garlic and turning acorns into flour for Rappahannock Acorn Cakes. To toast your new skill, they even include recipes for cordials.
The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants is a great gift for the beginning naturalist or the perfect addition to every serious forager's library.
Lytton John Musselman is the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany in the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is coeditor and author of several books, including Plants of the Chesapeake Bay: A Guide to Wildflowers, Grasses, Aquatic Vegetation, Trees, Shrubs, and Other Flora, also published by Johns Hopkins.
Harold J. Wiggins is an environmental scientist with the Regulatory Program, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He is cofounder of the Fredericksburg chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society and is the author of three books, including Virginia Native Plants.
"The book is witty and full of commonsense. It is a jolly good read for anyone."
– Portland Book Review
"Whether this is your passion or merely something you might be interested in learning about, check out The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants [...] Should I ever get a craving for stinging nettle omelet or black locust fritters, I will know exactly which wild edible plant book to look in."
– Aiken Standard
"Dr. Musselman is a passionate botanist. Walking among plant life makes him very happy, which means he is happy most of the time, except when riding in a car stuck in a long tunnel. He will stop people on the street to tell them some great news from the plant world."
– Garrison Keillor
"Drawing from a lifetime of foraging experience, Musselman and Wiggins expand the reader's food gathering repertoire with simple recipes and a fascinating assortment of plants largely overlooked by the wild food literature."
– Samuel Thayer, author of The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
