The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants: Easy to Pick, Easy to Prepare

Field-to-table cuisine! Connect with (and eat) the diverse flora around us.

A recent rise in the popularity of urban farming, farmers’ markets, and foraging from nature means more people are looking for information about plants. In The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants, botanists Lytton John Musselman and Harold J. Wiggins coach you on how to safely identify, gather, and prepare delicious dishes from readily available plants―and clearly indicate which ones to avoid.

More than 200 color illustrations, accompanied by detailed descriptions, will help you recognize edible plants such as nettles, daylilies, river oats, and tearthumbs. For decades, Musselman and Wiggins have taught courses on how to prepare local plants, and their field-to-table recipes require only a few, easily found ingredients. They offer instructions for making garlic powder out of field garlic and turning acorns into flour for Rappahannock Acorn Cakes. To toast your new skill, they even include recipes for cordials.

The Quick Guide to Wild Edible Plants is a great gift for the beginning naturalist and the perfect addition to every serious forager’s library.

Lytton John Musselman is the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve at Old Dominion University. He is author of A Dictionary of Bible Plants and Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran.

Harold J. Wiggins is a wetlands ecologist and environmental scientist who spent over 24 years with the Regulatory Program, US Army Corps of Engineers. He is the cofounder of the Fredericksburg chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society and the author of Virginia Native Plants.