National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants

Forage more than 100 delicious edible plants straight from your backyard with this useful, engaging, beautifully illustrated guide.

Nature-lovers, gardeners, and foodies can turn their backyard into a bounty with tips for identifying wild plants, advice for beginner and experienced harvesters, and more than 600 ideas and recipes to bring the wild into the kitchen.

Joining National Geographic's long line of successful nature guides, National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants is a colorful, appealing handbook to 102 common wild plants that can be foraged for delicious food and drink. From superstar sunflowers to spicy field mustard to alluring wild grapes, this book identifies a wide variety of flavors and textures that even novice foragers can learn to harvest with care, safety, and sustainability. From there, creative uses abound, including the how-tos behind:

• elderberry jam
• chickweed salad
• sunchoke soup
• sassafras tea 
• wild carrot cake
• homemade backyard cider

This guide is divided into seven sections based on the parts of the plant most relevant to foragers: roots, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, shoots, as well as the "backyard superstars"—a dozen plants that are common, easy to identify, and abundant in their culinary possibilities. Every plant is photographed, illustrated for ease of learning, and described in detail, including hundreds of preparation tips and recipes, thanks to authors Mimi Prunella Hernandez and Heather Wood Buzzard, who bring botanical authority and kitchen creativity to every entry.

Mimi Prunella Hernandez, MS, RH (AHG), an herbalist and author of National Geographic Herbal, is devoted to combinining traditional and scientifically validated herbal practices. In 2023 she received the Botanical Excellence Award from the American Botanical Council, which she served for more than a decade as executive director. She lives on her own nature preserve outside Asheville, NC.

Heather Wood Buzzard, MA, has worked as a wildcrafter and trained in Southern folk medicine with renowned 4th-generation herbalist Phyllis Light. Now, as an herbal educator and health writer, she marries the two fields of medicinal plants and therapeutic writing. She is based near Asheville, NC.