The Book!
It's been a while since I posted to this blog (or, ahem, did a podcast). But I KICKED IT OLD SCHOOL and wrote a book. I hope that suffices for an excuse... and I'd like to tell you a bit about the book.
Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities will hit bookstores in November 2022. I'll have copies a bit earlier, straight from New Society Publishers. If you want to help the book launch really well, you can pre-order a copy from me, or from your favorite bookseller.
Those of you who have been reading this blog may find the book's theme familiar: by tending habitats for native foods and medicines, we benefit the quality and diversity of the entire wild community.
Wild Plant Culture is a comprehensive guide to the ecological restoration of native edible and medicinal plant communities in Eastern North America. Blending science, practice, and traditional knowledge, it makes bold connections that are actionable, innovative, and ecologically imperative for repairing both degraded landscapes and our broken cultural relationship with nature. Coverage includes:
● Understanding and engaging in mutually beneficial human-plant connections
● Techniques for observing the land's existing and potential plant communities
● Baseline monitoring, site preparation, seeding, planting, and maintaining restored areas
● Botanical fieldwork restoration stories and examples
● Detailed profiles of 209 native plants and their uses.
Both a practical guide and an evocative read that will transport you deep into the natural landscape, Wild Plant Culture is a toolkit for gardeners, farmers, and ecological restoration practitioners, highlighting the important role humans play in tending and mending native plant communities.
The book is a hands-on guide, but I'd also like to say that it is suffused with stories that really bring it to life and make it a fun read for the beginner and advanced practitioner alike.
The book evolved over so many years. In my first outline (from February 2016!) – I have the title and concept more or less hashed out. To profile habitats, tell stories about plants, and detail restoration "guilds" of plants by habitat type.
Then I threw in the kitchen sink – every clever thought, scrap of an essay, or tangential bit that might work. Sorry to my early readers Chris Berry and Pat Coleman who had to give me comments on one of those drafts back in 2017 or so!
The book was more-or-less in current form by 2020, but still needed some stern editing and restructuring to really hum. But what it really needed was a publisher. After a few false starts, and pretty much giving up on this rather opaque part of the book-making process, I reached out to New Society Publishers (thanks Megan for the recommendation to check them out!) Caylie Graham at New Society was immediately excited about working together, and not much later we were under contract.
I'll be sharing excerpts from the book on this blog and on social media in the coming months. I hope you'll help me by sharing onward if what I've written resonates with you, and by staying in touch with comments and questions.
