Since January has been extra chilly for North Texas and I haven’t been doing much foraging, this blog post is going to be a review of my #1 favorite foraging book of all time. I’ve been amassing my current collection of foraging, edible wild plant, medicinal plant, and field guide type books for about 20 years now, and the absolute crowning jewel of my collection happened to just come out last year, in May of 2023. I guess this isn’t that surprising, since all good informational and reference material should build on the knowledge and wisdom of past material, but it isn’t every day that the world’s top foraging expert (and most would agree that he is) publishes a truly masterful and comprehensive field guide with 100% coverage of a full two-thirds of North America.
It’s much more common to see a well-written, fairly thorough field guide that applies to one state, or a region at the most (and I already have plenty of these good kinds of books), but Sam Thayer always has to obliterate everyone’s expectations.
One reason I want to write about Sam and his books, especially this recent one, is because many who are new to foraging are looking for an accurate and thorough field guide, but have been overwhelmed by the seemingly exponential increase in published material available online in recent years. Looking for foraging books on Amazon is a good example, where some of the top listings claim to be “forager’s harvest bibles” that are “15 books in 1”, even though they’re only 200 pages, so those 15 “books” must be pretty short. They are also the self-proclaimed “ultimate” and “most comprehensive” guides out there. Many of these are from authors that no one in the foraging community has ever heard of, with no other books to their name, and no website or other information about this person’s past foraging and teaching experience. This is an issue that has come onto the radar in the worldwide foraging community, and is alarming to many of us.
There has been a movement very recently towards using artificial intelligence to generate content, and this could be one explanation for the recent explosion in new titles on foraging by previously unknown authors. The major issue with this, in practice, is that AI does not have the discernment of a knowledgeable human who has been studying the nuances of botany and foraging, as well as actually touching and tasting plants, for a good chunk of their human lifetimes. This means that there could be numerous inaccuracies in these materials. Most of the time, an inaccurate tidbit about a plant could result in a minor mistake without much consequence, but the wrong piece of information about the wrong plant could result in a serious mistake that could cost someone their health, or worse.
Now, we can’t say for sure that this influx of new publications from unknown authors are relying on AI, but even a real person without extensive foraging experience could pass on inaccurate information. For me personally, I prefer to study from foraging experts who have had decades of hands-on experience in the field, who have earned the trust of the foraging community through their integrity, accuracy and good leadership.
I know of quite a few folks who fit that bill for me, and foremost among them is Samuel Thayer. Prior to the Field Guide he published last year, he wrote three large volumes with extensive information on the plants he chose to feature. The first one came out in 2006, called The Forager’s Harvest (not to be confused with several Amazon knockoffs capitalizing on this name that have been published since). The following two are Nature’s Garden (2010) and Incredible Wild Edibles (2017). Although they can be purchased on Amazon and other online booksellers, the links I’m sharing are directly to his website, as I’m sure he gets a much higher percentage of the profits from books purchased through his own online store. The most unique attribute of Sam’s first three books is the vast quantity of information on each plant. There are fewer entries overall (which is ultimately why there are three books), but each entry spans many pages, even up to nearly 50 pages for the most important edible wild plants. They are veritable encyclopedias of all the plants he chose to feature.
Although I have read each of his first three books straight through at least once, each book includes more than a handful of plants I had never seen before or since. This is because he is based in the northern US (Wisconsin), so the range of his featured plants only somewhat overlaps with the North Texas plant communities that grow within my homeland. This changed with his new Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern & Central North America. For the first time, one of Sam’s books is covering all the best wild edible plants of my area!
If any book could claim to be “15 books in 1”, it would be this one, but Sam’s humility and attention to detail would surely have him consider 736 pages as not one page too many to make one full book, to say all of what really needs to be said.
Of course, such a massive tome needs to be well organized, and he does that perfectly. There are at least 5 ways to find the plant you’re looking for within the book. If you don’t know what plant you’re looking at in the field, you can key it out near the beginning of the book with his succinct, to-the-point, color-coded plant identification key, to find out if it’s an edible species included in the book. Or you can turn a couple pages further to the List of Plant Groups in the Table of Contents, which are organized in an exceptionally intuitive way. If you skip to the back of the book, there’s a list of 11 Important Plant Families with edible species of each family listed along with their locations in the book. This is helpful if you know your plant is a member of the mint, mustard, aster or other common families, and want to get to it quickly. In the next section, you can find plants by habitat and season. Or you can go straight for the index, which lists both common and scientific names, to find the species you’re looking for. He calls this the “Regular Old Boring Index”, because there’s a much more interesting index following that one. It’s “The Best Index”, with lists of plants with headers like “Best survival foods”, “Best gourmet foods that you’ve probably never tried”, and “Best things to feed a first date”. It’s quite enlightening if you’re wondering about the practical uses of each plant in this book.
Now, onto the plant entries themselves. Unlike his previous books, each entry is short and to the point, which is how he’s able to include a whopping 679 edible species. However, each entry has every bit of the information necessary to identify the plant with 100% accuracy. The top section has the plant’s common name, scientific name, family, and icons indicating which plant parts are considered edible, as well as numbers rating their food value, in his opinion. He did not include a single plant in this book that he hasn’t consumed himself (that’s 679 plants, remember?), which is mind blowing, and truly puts this material in a league of its own.
Each plant entry includes all the necessary plant identification features, throughout all seasons. It includes the habitat, food uses, and his own comments based on his personal experiences and anecdotes. There’s also a range map for each plant, which I love, and one of my favorite ways to familiarize myself with this book has been turning pages and quickly glancing at each range map, stopping to take notice of plants that may grow in my area.
This book covers all the most important edible wild plants of North Texas, as well as many lesser known and more rare edible plants found here. It even includes plants that are edible, but many people erroneously believe NOT to be edible. My favorite examples are false garlic/crow poison (Nothoscordum bivalve) and hedge parsley (Torilis arvensis). In fact, this book’s identification information on hedge parsley made me feel more confident in personally consuming this pervasive weed, considering its fairly close resemblance to the deadly toxic poison hemlock. It also has a full section on poisonous plants.
This book came in handy last year when we took a trip the Ozarks, where I planned on studying and identifying many plants that don’t grow in my area. It gave me excellent and usable information on pawpaw, autumnberry, wood nettle, false nettle, the oaks and hickories and grapes of the Ozarks, perilla/shiso, American bellflower, bur-reed, yellow pond lily, and other wild edibles I found that grow outside my home range in North Texas. It was easy to find what I was looking for, and I would regularly scan the whole book looking for the range maps that covered southern Missouri, to prepare my mind for plants that I might see in my explorations.
I also recommend reading the entire introduction, which details necessary prerequisites to diving into foraging. It explains how to navigate the info in the plant entries; how to generally prepare different plant parts; defining edible, poisonous, native and invasive; strange phenomena like furanocoumarin rashes and “swallower’s remorse”; and interesting perspectives on topics like how to navigate an anti-foraging culture.
Whether you want to start a foraging library, or just want one book that gives you everything you need, Sam’s Field Guide is my top recommendation! I don’t have any affiliation with him, but I suggest purchasing it directly from his online store, even though you might have to wait a few days for delivery and you won’t get free Prime shipping 😉
Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America
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