An Instant Guide to Edible Plants (Instant Guides)

An Instant Guide to Edible Plants (Instant Guides)
by Pamela Forey, Cecilia Fitzsimons

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Book Summary Information

Author: Cecilia Fitzsimons, Pamela Forey
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1989-01-13
ISBN: 0517662175
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Gramercy

Book Reviews of An Instant Guide to Edible Plants (Instant Guides)

Book Review: Good and bad
Summary: 3 Stars

The good: This guide
* is small and compact
* is hardcover, more durable
* is sorted by edible plants parts
* is concise. It provides the most relevant information for identification and edibility on a single page

The bad: This guide
* has laughable distribution maps. They should be ignored. The distribution maps are extremely east-coast-centric, so it gives the appearance that all plants are either spread out over the entire continent, or are only on the east coast. The entry for blackberries, for example, says they don't grow here in Oregon. Anyone who lives on the west coast knows that blackberries are one of our major domestic and wild crops. They grow wild everywhere here. Same thing for the white oak entry.
* does not list any of the scientific names for any of the plant entries, one of the cardinal sins when constructing a nature guide. This makes it a bother to cross reference the entries in this book with other volumes. This is particularly useful when trying to determine whether something is a poisonous look-alike or not, dangerous when those scientific names are absent. Common names often are not the same when going from region to region. To make this book more useful I had to figure out and write in the family/genus/species names where appropriate so I could use it with other references.

Recommended but only as supplement to existing guides, such as Bradford Angier's Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants or a National Audubon field guide.

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Summary of An Instant Guide to Edible Plants (Instant Guides)

An Instant Guide to Edible Plants is an ideal compact guide to the identification and uses of the most commonly found edible wild plants of North America.
An easy-to-understand system of color-coded bands that denotes the edible part of the plant leads quickly to the correct section of the book. Detailed full-color illustrations, concise text, including information on the food uses of each species, and a distribution map allow you to make a positive identification. Symbols alert you to the dangers of similar, sometimes poisonous, plants.

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