Saturday, February 7, 2009

Edible Wild Plants A northwest field guide, by thomas s. elias and peter a. dykeman

Now I will be the first to admit I did not read this book cover to cover, and honestly I doubt that's the design of it anyway. I found the information in this book solid, educational, and yet it made me realize I need more than just this book. Of course the authors themselves would agree with me.

"Since it is impossible to distinguish among the 20,000 North American species in this or any other book, you may also want to refer to identification guides devoted to your own region or state."

After the above statment the authors list some good regional resources. So lets get down to what I liked and didn't like about this book.

Likes: Easy to follow, color photos, key makes it easy to identify uses for the plants. They even tell you how to best use the plant as well as how it can be used in survival in some cases. I also like that they seperated the plants by season. They also have an index where you can look the little guy up by name.

Dislikes (or they could have added this): They have a small picture of the region the plant grows on each photo. This is OK but I would also liked to have had a regional index. This way you could look up plants by their season in your region. Then all you have to do is turn directly to the specific page. This would have made more sense to me. I also have to agree with another reviewer that stated the pictures were TOO close up. This is nice but doesn't give you a clear visual how the plant will look in relation to the landscape. Sure, they give you a description of it's size in the text, but I would have like to have two smaller photos for each plant (they did this in some cases but not as frequently as I would have liked.

All in all I give this book a solid 4 stars. It's worth it's money and in my opinion is worth more than some three star reviewers are giving it credit for. However, I do believe (as do the authors) that you will probably need to supplement it with another text.

This is a good purchase.