Natures Garden by Samuel Thayer

This book now supercedes Thayer's first book (Forager's Harvest) as the best foraging book ever. The book offers the same highly detailed accounts of Thayer's personal experience identifying, locating, harvesting, and using wild plants as in his first book, but covering even more species. The 50 pages on acorn usage blew me away, giving me plenty of new useful information despite my 2-3 years of harvesting and using acorns myself. This new book covers 42 new species, which is 10 more than the first book with an extra 150 pages!

The table of contents lists the subjects and specific plants covered:

• • Nature's Garden
  • The Purpose of This Book
  • The Plants and Region Covered by This Book
  • A Note on Plant Names
• Getting Started With Edible Wild Plants
  • Where to Forage
  • Why Wild Food?
  • Conservation
• Does Foraging Harm the Environment?
• Plant Identification and Safe Consumption
• Some Thoughts on Wild Food
  • Don't Make it Fit
  • There Are No Instant Experts
  • The Ethnographic Void
  • What is a Meristem and Why Should I Care?
  • Poisonous Plant Fables
• One Month Eating Wild
• Timing the Wild Harvest
  • Calendar
• Plant Accounts
  • Trout Lily, Fawn Lily, Glacier Lily
  • Solomon's Seal
  • False Solomon's Seal, Solomon's Plume
  • American Lotus
  • Mayapple
  • Hackberry, Sugarberry
  • Walnut, Black Walnut
  • Acorn
  • Hazelnut
  • Prickly Pear, Nopal
  • Amaranth, Pigweed, Water-Hemp
  • Dock
  • Maypop, Passion Flower, Apricot Vine
  • Toothwort
  • Garlic Mustard
  • Blueberry, Huckleberry, Bilberry
  • Cranberry, Lingonberry
  • Black Huckleberry
  • New Jersey Tea, Oregon Tea, Ceanothus
  • Wild Strawberry
  • Black Cherry
  • Sandcherry
  • Wild Plum
  • Aronia, ChokeBBBBerry
  • Autumnberry, Autumn-olive
  • Bunchberry, Dwarf Cornel
  • Wood Sorrel
  • Honewort, Wild Chervil
  • Wild Carrot
  • Cow Parsnip
  • Black Nightshade
  • Bugleweed
  • Elderberry
  • Jerusalem-artichoke
  • Ox-Eye Daisy
  • The Lettuce-Dandelion Group
  • Wild Lettuce
  • Sow-thistle
  • Prenanthes, White Lettuce
  • Dandelion
  • Chicory
  • Salsify, Oyster Plant, Goat's Beard

• • Bibliography
  • Glossary
  • Index
  • About the Author