A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand

This New Zealand classic has remained in print (and continually updated) for almost 40 years, selling almost 40,000 copies courtesy of four different publishers. The book, now in its 23rd printing, is "based on the experiences of the author whose interest in the subject lead him to spend 10 days in the bush in February 1974 without any food supplies... [It] has deservedly become an enduring classic from an author who is fast becoming one of our most prolific writers on native plants."
Mike Oates, Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture

"The story of how he was inspired to write the book is almost as intriguing as the revelations about his 190 chosen plants. Suffice to say, it involved some hungry, testing times in the wild and, at the very least, a couple of knowledgeable mentors... a possible life-saver."
Weekend Gardener , Issue 152, 2004.

As Brando Yelavich of Wildboy fame (Penguin 2015) "armed with a crossbow, a copy of Andrew Crowe’s Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand and a 35kg pack loaded with the essentials of survival, [he] headed off... to become the first person to successfully circumnavigate New Zealand’s rugged coastline on foot."

The survival manual he took for this impressive adventure is a guide to New Zealand's native edible plants, that describes over 190 trees, shrubs, herbs, ferns, mushrooms, lichens and seaweeds, giving detailed information on which part is edible and when, how plants have been utilised, particularly by Maori, their nutritional value, and where they can be found.

This book was inspired by a ten-day survival experiment I undertook in the early 1970s. While researching, illustrating and writing it, I was often asked, 'Who would be interested?' Remarkably, it has since gone into 15 printings with four different publishers and this in a country - New Zealand - with only 4 million inhabitants. It took three years to write, living in a cave for part of that time and written originally by hand. Like all my books, it was 'a labour of love' and funded by the luxury of knowing how to live on nothing. If you bought or read the book, thank you!