I created this page to do research and learn about the wild (or not) plants that grow around my home in the M.E. (Metro East-of St. Louis) and share the information with friends (That's you!). Most people see these plants as weeds and have no idea how interesting they really are. The amount of information and utility is almost infinite for each plant. Ancestral plant knowledge has been disregarded and forgotten by most modern people. Let's relearn this information together. Many plants that grow in and around your neighborhood also grow on several or more continents and are almost ubiquitous - found everywhere!
This website was also born out of my "Family Field Guide." I've been keeping a composition notebook describing and naming plants that I've come to find in my neighborhood. My dream is that my kids, as they grow up, will have fond memories of our family nature walks and will keep this site and the book to share with their families.
If you have a story to tell, no matter if you're an amateur or professional botanist, or forager, please participate in adding to this site. Consider adding location information the best you can, and original photography is best. By clicking this link, anyone, anywhere, can contribute information about any plant they wish to this page.
This site will always be a work in progress as we all learn along the way.
Respectfully,
JRH admin@plantid.me
More about me:
I have always loved being outside and in nature. While I had a strong fascination with the plants that are growing all around me, I didn’t have the slightest clue what in the world I was looking at. When I started to casually look into the matter, I discovered that you can eat a lot of the plants that are just growing around us, even in our yard. Not only can you eat them, but they are also very healthy, and some are used as drugs and other medicines that have sustained humans for more than 75,000 years.
I bought my first plant ID and wild edibles book around 2014, Edible Wild Plants, by John Kallas. There are a lot of pictures and important useful information in Kallas’ book. That being said, my botanical and basic plant knowledge was zero when I began hunting plants; I was starting from scratch. I started by focusing on just one plant, Lambs Quarters, in the book. I actively tried walking wastelands and woods trying to find Lambs Quarters. I had buddies stop a car and pull over thinking I had finally found one….but nope. I just couldn’t see the patterns right away among all the other plants present. It was like teaching myself Chinese with no background in language, at all. It was really hard. It took me several years on my own before I started recognizing the plants I was actively looking for. It turns out I found a young Lambs Quarters in my backyard. Words and pictures in books don’t do real-life plants justice no matter how well the printed words describe them, especially the wild plants that we are not used to paying any attention to. I suspect that if I had a teacher, or a fellow plant hunter to pick their brain, the learning process would have been much quicker. Once I was able to find and eat my first plant, the process, though still very challenging, became somewhat easier. Once the plants are found and discovered, tasting and smelling the plants have a much bigger impact on the plant learning process. I'm very confident in identifying several dozen plants and trees and am learning new ones all of the time.
I have a desire that this site could be used as a collaboration where like-minded people can share what they’ve learned. That’s why I have added maps of exactly where I have found these plants. So you don’t have to take several years figuring it out. The maps are incomplete and will grow over time, especially if readers like you are interested in helping update the maps with what you find.
Plants are very complicated because they are always growing and changing. They may only look like the picture in a book for a week or two before they morph into a different shape. It might take a while, but I‘d like to update this website over the next many years with better descriptions and original photographs of the plants throughout their different stages of growth.
For the uninitiated, foraging at first glance may appear dangerous and nasty. That's okay. Let people think what they want. But the truth is that the risk is very low, and the benefits are innumerable. Also, don’t tell anyone, except your friends, about all these cool plants in the neighborhood otherwise they’d all be gone. I kinda get a kick out of searching for the plants and then finding them.
Before starting a wild edible journey, you need to read the boring first chapters in many of the books on how to approach safely eating wild plants because this site makes no assertions on what is safe to eat.
Contributor:
JRH
Site Editor:
JCH
Feb 2021