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hello ladies and gents

im trying to get hold of a good field guide for identifying edible and medicinal plants/herbs. can anyone recommend anything in particular?

cheers,
daniele

I love 'Food for Free' by Richard Mabey.

MW

One book will never be enough I warn you!

I currently have over 60 titles (and rising!) on my bookshelves that are specifically about, or include information on plant identification and their culinary/medicinal uses. Food For Free is OK, but you might find you quickly exhaust its basic list as you learn but it can be a reasonable place to start. Have a cruise around Amazon to get a real feel for what's out there, then go and find them on the bookshop shelf so that you can have a browse inside. And don't forget your library - most of them seem to have a system where you can order in specific titles to borrow if they don't already hold them so it's worth asking & that could save you splashing out on a guide that you might not get along with.

The best guides are comprehensive and well illustrated covering stuff like flower/seed/leaf shape and habitat but these are obviously usually too big to carry! Pocket ones can be a bit limited, so what I tend to do is read loads of books and then use a simple colour code to cross reference the info into a really good but more portable id book. I've found Collins titles for plants to be reasonable although I do have issues with some of their publications about fungi. Any of the 'Gems' series are worth a look, but my real favourites are a self-published series by johnny jumbalaya. Perfect for hardcore foragers who already know what to look for, they're full of creative culinary ideas and are highly original - I love them but they're titles you may need to go through the countrylovers website to get hold of as they don't tend to appear on the high street. Have a look here to see what I mean: http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/wfs/wfsbooks.htm

Mabey's "Food for Free" is available as a Collins Gem now. Very handy to pop in your pocket although some of the pictures of the fungi are a little bit small.

Includes a few recipes too.

Two good floras I use - Frances Rose and also Paul Sterry's Collins guide. I have Sterry's flowering plants one but I know he does others. Medicinally - you can't go wrong with Julian Barker's 'Medicinal plants of Britain and Northwestern Europe. For edible foods, Ken Fern's 'Plants for a Future' is a good read. Although it focuses more on cultivation than foraging, it gives a good idea whats edible and what's not (although 'edible' doesn't necessarily always equate to 'tasty'). There is an older guide kicking about - i think its a Hamlyn guide...? - which is fairly comprehensive but is out of print and second hand copies sell for over £100...

Right - I'm off to find out more about Johnny Jambalaya!

What a fantastic looking collection of books! If I had any money at all i'd buy them all. The link has been delicioused but, for when I've got a few more pennies...

The Hamlyn guide is pretty useful although rather dated (as you might expect). I got mine for about £7 from a book dealer and don't really understand some of the pricing you get on Amazon at all. To be honest, I think that some of it is just sellers chancing their arm - it's a good little book, but not that good!

I'm saving the pennies too. One other useful thing to do is search through the listings on Google books. Antiquarian books, reports and magazines from worldwide sources have been being scanned (think project Gutenberg) and a huge number are available to read online or download for free. As I also have a bit of a thing for antique cookery/herbals/smallholding and plant cultivation books I used these headings as the basis for searches and found loads of stuff. The favourite so far has to be this one:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&i ... q=&f=false

If you use Google then you'll find google books via the toolbar on the search homepage. Have a play with it, you'll be amazed at what you can find!

Have looked at all these and still unsure in which direction to go, Food for Free (Collins GEM) by Richard Mabey is a definite as under £3 on amazon now but would like one other to qualify for free postage!!!

More suggestions or no goes please :)