The Secrets of Wildflowers: A Delightful Feast of Little-Known Facts, Folklore, and History

Jack Sanders's colorful tribute to wildflowers is bursting with odd facts, ingenious uses, and bizarre superstition about some of North America's most beautiful and common plants. There are more than 10,000 varieties of wildflowers in North America, some rare, some so plentiful that they are designated as invasive weeds. Each has a unique story.
There's Bouncing Bet, a perennial common along the roads and railroad tracks of America. Like many of our most abundant summer wildflowers, Bet was brought over to fill colonial gardens. It's a beautiful plant, but also a useful one. Open up the stalk and its sap makes a fine soap. Colonial beermakers used to put a dab in to help the head on a brew. Doctors used it to wash wounds. Generally considered a weed, it's everywhere.
Or Coltsfoot, which pops up almost alone in winters, and was used in New England as a cure for coughs, the leaves boiled down in water. Asthmatics, Sanders tells us, used to smoke it for relief. For many years, apothecaries in France used Coltsfoot as its symbol, a surprising pedigree for a neglected "weed."
More a companion than a field guide, THE SECRETS OF WILDFLOWERS is a must-have for anyone who enjoys a walk in a meadow or a gaze outside.

JACK SANDERS is the northeast field editor for Wildflower magazine and has written about wildflowers for The New York Times. The editor of The Ridgefield Press, he lives with his wife, Sally, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.