Urban Foraging: Find, Gather, and Cook 50 Wild Plants

The publisher and author provide a warning before this book even begins that ingesting wild plants and fungi is a risky undertaking, a point that Rose (Midwest Medicinal Plants) continues to stress in her introduction, which highlights a range of pollutants and toxins that could be on even properly identified items. With that forager-beware caveat in place, Rose offers a quick guide to botany basics, a forager’s tool kit, and the legal rules of foraging. The rest of the book is devoted to the most common urban plants the very brave and deeply informed reader might pick, from apples to yarrow. Along the way there are blackberries, garlic mustard, peppermint, raspberries, and wild carrots, on top of less common choices such as ground ivy and daylily. Each entry offers a photo, brief identification and gathering information, and notes on its culinary uses; many also have recipes.