Product Description

Derived from the author's "Flora Britannica", this book takes a broad definition of herbs and includes 100 wild plants of England, Scotland and Wales. As well as describing them, the author gives an account of the role of wild herbs in social life, arts, custom and landscape.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #497852 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Comforting soup and wild potions
Mabey draws on a national survey to bring together the local voices of many who wrote in with their oral traditions. Like Harry Potter, this book is full of weird facts that can be stored up in a mental magic herbal, but these facts might be more useful, just sometimes.

Thanks to Richard Mabey, I now know that the dog's mercury that grows in our front garden in with the mint really can poison you; that garlic mustard and the next door neighbour's allotment sorrel are nice stir-fried; that what we saw growing on the Welsh border moors were bilberries; and that the sweet cicely that grows in our back garden tastes of aniseed. I have grazed on sprigs of marsh samphire as I strolled along a Cumbrian beach. And I've dug a good lot of compost into my mint patch to revive it.

This book is very easy to pick up and read, and the photographs are beautiful.