Edible And Useful Plants Of The Southwest

Originally published: Practical guide to edible and useful plants. Austin, Tex.: Texas Monthly Press, c1987.

A guide to useful Southwestern wild plants, including recipes, teas, spices, dyes, medicinal uses, poisonous plants, fibers, basketry, and industrial uses. All around us there are wild plants useful for food, medicine, and clothing, but most of us don’t know how to identify or use them. Delena Tull amply supplies that knowledge in this book, which she has now expanded to more thoroughly address plants found in New Mexico and Arizona, as well as Texas. Extensively illustrated with black-and-white drawings and color photos, this book includes the following special features: · Recipes for foods made from edible wild plants · Wild teas and spices · Wild plant dyes, with instructions for preparing the plants and dying wool, cotton, and other materials · Instructions for preparing fibers for use in making baskets, textiles, and paper · Information on wild plants used for making rubber, wax, oil, and soap · Information on medicinal uses of plants · Details on hay fever plants and plants that cause rashes · Instructions for distinguishing edible from poisonous berries Detailed information on poisonous plants, including poison ivy, oak, and sumac, as well as herbal treatments for their rashes

Describes 50 Southwest plants that are edible or useful, with a page devoted to each plant's description, range, family, and uses, accompanied by color photographs.

"Written to be easily accessible to general readers, the book is a valuable compendium for anyone interested in the desert's hidden bounty."--Jacket.

This work discusses beverage plants, vegetable substitutes for soap, medicinal plants, and those that can be used as fibers, dyes, smoking material, adhesives, and candles. A final chapter describes a variety of poisonous plants. "Secure a copy of this very enlightening book. In fact, if you travel, it should be a constant companion." — St. Petersburg Independent. 94 illustrations.

In this book, close to one hundred men and women from all over southwest Alaska share knowledge of their homeland and the plants that grow there. They speak eloquently about time spent gathering and storing plants and plant material during snow-free months, including gathering greens during spring, picking berries each summer, harvesting tubers from the caches of tundra voles, and gathering a variety of medicinal plants. The book is intended as a guide to the identification and use of edible and medicinal plants in southwest Alaska, but also as an enduring record of what Yup’ik men and women know and value about plants and the roles plants continue to play in Yup’ik lives.