Plants Field Guides

A good pocket-sized guide covering edible plants, fruit and nuts. Includes photos of all species, but otherwise not the best at identification details.

Generally, a good read with plenty of interesting asides and anecdotes.

Probably the best known wild food foraging book. Covers a wide range of target species including plants, fungi, seaweeds and shellfish. Identification is via drawn illustrations and feature descriptions, but no photos.

This book is available in a number of different editions and formats - so be careful which one you buy. The one linked here is a suitable size to be used as a field-guide.

Another good general foraging guide, covering a wide range of species types (plants, fungi, fruit, shellfish, etc.). The identification information is good with drawings and photographs provided.

The book is organised by season, so you can view species together that you might find at the same time.

This is the only guide here that is specifically for plants only. The coverage of british plants is extensive but isn't focused on edible plants. The coverage is of a more technical nature and perhaps more suitable to amateur botanists rather than foragers.

Given the above caveats, it is a definitive key so can be useful as a home reference for double-checking species identification.

This book is based on the TV series by the popular outdoor and survival expert Ray Mears. The focus of the series is on the prehistoric hunter-gatherer diet and while a section of the book also deals with this, the bulk of the book is a species-level description of the various plant foods available in the UK. Each plant species is well described with extensive use of photographs.

The book is probably too large to use as a field guide, but is a useful home reference.