Forage in Summer: A Foraging Guide to the Past and Present Uses of Wild Plants for Food and Medicine

Forage in Summer is a celebration of the top fifteen edible and medicinal wild plants found in June, July and August. It’s a comprehensive exploration into their past and present uses as food and medicine, including their forgotten folklore.

An invaluable addition to any forager, herbalist, gardener, horticulturist or naturalist’s library, providing plant-lovers with a much-needed resource to understanding nature’s most useful wild plants.

It covers bramble, burdock, chickweed, elder, fat hen, lime/linden, mallow, meadowsweet, mugwort, oxeye daisy, rosebay willowherb, samphire, sea aster, selfheal and yarrow.

Inside this comprehensive reference, you’ll:

• Discover the traditional and contemporary food and medicine uses of wild plants.
• Learn their folklore and stories.
• Includes delicious recipes.
• Each plant is beautifully illustrated with a black and white Victorian botanical print.
• Know which part of the plant to use.
• When the best time to harvest is.
• Nutritional profiles for each plant are covered.
• Safety notes – what you need to know if pregnant or on medication.

Plants have stories, stories that reconnect us to the Land and the rest of Nature.

As our society evermore disconnects, there is a revivalist movement flourishing like a rhizome. This ancient path of the forager reconnects us to the vital, to wildness, to creation, to what is in effect the very pulse of life itself.

One of the most direct ways to experience this is to consume this wildness. Take it into our bodies, where like a sleeper agent, it lies dormant until you have eaten enough to change the structure of your blood, thereby changing your brain and how you relate to the non-human world.

For it is this simple act. The act of taking wild food and medicine into our body, that in time becomes so transformative.

Forage in Summer is not a harking back to some naive, romantic vision of how we might once have lived. Instead, these plants’ stories are a way to help you sense into the future and understand our ecological function (as a species) within the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Harford is a forager, ethnobotanical researcher and wild food educator. He has published numerous foraging guide books.

He established his wild food foraging school in 2008, and his foraging courses were recently voted #1 in the country by BBC Countryfile.
Robin is the creator of eatweeds.co.uk, listed in The Times Top 50 websites for food and drink.

He has travelled extensively, documenting and recording the traditional and local uses of wild food plants in indigenous cultures. His work has taken him to Africa, India, SE Asia, Europe and the USA.

Robin has appeared on national and local radio and television and been featured in BBC Good Food magazine, Sainsbury’s magazine, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, etc.