Compare Prices and Find Best Deals Online!

No matter how well you know your wild edibles, American forager Samuel Thayer can teach you something. His brand new how-to book, called “Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants,” is by far the best work on the subject, well worth the $25 cover price.

What sets “Nature’s Garden” apart from other guide books is its incredible depth. Thayer is true to his subtitle as he tackles the intricacies of 42 common plants found across North America — including dock, elderberry, acorns, wild lettuce, amaranth, chickory and huckleberry — over 512 glossy pages. Packed with outstanding full-color photos and helpful charts (for instance, on the characteristics of red vs. white acorns), the book is highly useful for beginning and advanced foragers alike. It is written in an accessible yet scholarly style that avoids jargon whenever possible.

Thayer’s propensity for going the extra mile on the details makes this a total win for readers who really want to try this in the field. Lots of books might tell you, for instance, that young dock leaves taste better than older ones. But Thayer offers helpful tips like, “They do not have to be tiny, just young,” and “As long as the sides are even slightly rolled up, the leaf will be tender. Often…you will find them very slimy. Don’t worry: the slime is a sign that you are getting leaves at the right stage, and it will rinse off.”

Though it’s by and large a how-to, there is a narrative element as the author opens each chapter with a reflective personal anecdote about his experiences. These can be serious in tone, so I appreciated the occasional levity in the captions: Passifloracea, he writes, is “arguably the coolest-looking flower in the world.” And the first 75 pages are an entertaining read as Thayer reveals his personal views on what really killed Christopher McCandless of “Into the Wild.”

Thayer’s first book, “The Forager’s Harvest,” was published in 2006 and has become a respected standard, covering 32 wild foods, from cattail to stinging nettle (the newest work does repeat a few, but not many). One of my favorite features is a handy calendar outlining the harvest times for various plant parts from March through November. Fortunately, the latest work does too.

Go to [...] for more on edible plants!
Rating: 5 / 5

I like that he has first hand knowledge and has (it sounds like) dedicated his life to this topic. It is nice that he goes into depth on each plant and shows poisonous look-alike plants. I find this book to be well written; interesting to read; and useful for this topic. It is nice that he spends time discussing the myths about harvesting wild edibles. It helps to allay some of the fear and societal pressure against it.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book is great as a complement to the first one out by the same author, Forager’s Harvest but you can not go wrong with either of them. I am using them to enjoy greater nutrition and variety of food sources. This book has even more selections than the first one and great detail on Acorns. To me there is no better way to begin this activity than with these two books. I have no one to teach me about these plants but am quite comfortable learning about them in this way. I have began to eat wild carrots and lettuces, burdock root etc. to start out. The flavors are fun to experience for the first time and generally quite a surprise such as wood sorrel that tastes like lemon but looks similar to clover. The author has gone to great lengths to put this book together and I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5

I have about a dozen different books on edible wild plants in my library, and Samuel Thayer’s books are by far my favorites. Where other authors attempt to give you a huge list of all of the edible plants in the United States, or a large area thereof, Sam has narrowed his focus to a much smaller number of plants that have significant food value. A brief glance at other wild edibles books will show that a large proportion of the plants listed in them are only suitable for use as a tea or salad green. Rarely do they make much distinction between what is simply edible and what actually tastes good, or give sufficiently detailed instructions for those plants which require special preparations. In contrast, Sam presents extensive, detailed instructions and photographs on identification, harvest, preparation, and storage of those plants which are not just edible, but also delicious, and that have sufficient caloric value to be capable of serving a meaningful role in the diet of a forager.

Like his first book, “The Forager’s Harvest”, “Nature’s Garden” has a regional bias toward plants that are found in the Midwestern United States. However, he has selected plants that have a wide geographic distribution to make this volume useful over a larger area. About half of the species covered in the book occur in all of the lower 48 states.

I would recommend this book very highly to anyone who is interested in learning more about edible wild plants, no matter their experience level.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book is deep into 5 star territory, right at or near the top. The author clearly combined a lot of research on edible plants along with a lot of personal experience. I have picked just a couple of the plants that are reviewed so far but they match the descriptions of the author exactly.

More than a book on gathering herbs, if you are open to it, this will change the way that you think about the natural world and early North American history. North American has edible plants all over as if it were the remains of wild/forest gardens tended to for thousands of years.

Great descriptions of both the plants to pick, whether similar plants are edible [that you might mistake a plant for along with detailed descriptions of poisonous plants you could mistake for edible ones.
Rating: 5 / 5