Sam Thayer's Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America
by Samuel Thayer · Forager's Harvest Press
Thayer's 736-page guide documents 679 edible wild plants of eastern and central North America with 1,700 photographs and 625 range maps. Accounts cover toxic lookalikes, harvest timing and preparation. Won the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award.
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More resources on Foraging & Mycology
The Forager's Harvest
In-depth guide to thirty-two North American wild edible plants, covering identification features, dangerous look-alikes, habitat, harvest season and preparation. Opening chapters explain why edibility tests and shortcut rules fail, teaching readers how to make a confident positive identification before eating.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
Sheldrake, a Cambridge-trained mycologist, surveys fungal biology: mycorrhizal networks, lichen symbiosis, decomposition and fungal behaviour. Written for general readers with extensive citations. Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Background reading rather than an identification guide.
The Fifth Kingdom (online chapters) — Mycolog.com
Real systematic mycology — phyla, life cycles, genetics, ecology — which is what separates this topic from a recipe hobby, and the free chapters include poisonous fungi. Bryce Kendrick's companion site to his mycology textbook The Fifth Kingdom, with nine chapters in full text covering slime moulds, zygomycetes, ascomycetes, fungal genetics, ecology and poisonous fungi, plus over 800 captioned images. Free.
North American Mycological Association
The institutional primary source. The poisoning-syndromes page gives species, onset timing, clinical presentation and treatment per syndrome, and correctly disclaims itself as not a diagnostic aid. The North American Mycological Association publishes free toxicology material, including a breakdown of ten poisoning syndromes with onset times and treatment, a poisoning case registry, volunteer identification consultants, and a directory of over ninety regional mushroom clubs and forays.
MushroomExpert.Com
Michael Kuo's free site holds over 1,300 North American species pages plus dichotomous keys organized by morphology. It teaches spore printing, chemical tests and microscopy, and states plainly that comparing mushrooms to pictures rarely works. It refuses to publish edibility information at all, forcing users through keys rather than toward a dinner decision, and explicitly warns that picture-comparison fails.
All That the Rain Promises and More: A Hip Pocket Guide to Western Mushrooms
Arora's pocket companion covers roughly 200 western North American species with keys, lookalike comparisons and explicit toxicity warnings. Sized to carry in the field, it complements rather than replaces the full keyed treatment in Mushrooms Demystified. Keyed, with edible/poisonous pairs treated side by side rather than as a list of 'safe' mushrooms.