Pacific Northwest Foraging: 120 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Alaska Blueberries to Wild Hazelnuts
292Pacific Northwest Foraging: 120 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Alaska Blueberries to Wild Hazelnuts
292eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
“Doug Deur invites us to discover the taste and history of the Northwest.” —Spencer B. Beebe, author of Cache and founder of Ecotrust
The Pacific Northwest offers a veritable feast for foragers, and with Douglas Deur as your trusted guide you will learn how to safely find and identify an abundance of delicious wild plants. The plant profiles in Pacific Northwest Foraging include clear, color photographs, identification tips, guidance on how to ethically harvest, and suggestions for eating and preserving. A handy seasonal planner details which plants are available during every season. Thorough, comprehensive, and safe, this is a must-have for foragers in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781604696158 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Timber Press, Incorporated |
Publication date: | 06/03/2014 |
Series: | Regional Foraging Series |
Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 292 |
File size: | 29 MB |
Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Douglas Deur has been gathering native plants his whole life. He serves as a cultural ecologist for Native peoples of the western United States and Canada, documenting enduring plant use practices as well as the rituals, values, and technologies that have shaped traditional resource harvests and traditional understandings of the land. He is an associate research professor in the department of anthropology at Portland State University. He has also served as a senior research scientist in the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and as an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Much of his research is supported by the U.S. National Park Service and is used in the peaceful resolution of land-use disputes, as well as in land-use planning that serves to protect and restore culturally significant natural resources. Doug’s writings have appeared in books, academic journals, and alternative newspapers. With Nancy Turner, he coedited Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, the first book-length treatment of Native American plant cultivation traditions in the Pacific Northwest.
Read an Excerpt
Preface
Growing up between Portland’s exurban fringe and Oregon’s wind-beaten north coast, I experienced a childhood that played out alongside the deep green backdrop of Northwestern native plants. My earliest memories involve crawling through patches of wild strawberries that my mother had transplanted and tended into a robust backyard groundcover. When, as a toddler, I needed to nap but resisted, my mother walked me through the Douglas-fir and cedar forest behind our home, asking me to identify each plant by name until fatigue set in and I drifted off to sleep, with visions of Oregon grape and wild lilies dancing in my head. We cut trails into the blackberry thicket tangles in summertime to find the biggest and juiciest berries. We scaled mountains, where we gathered wild onions and ate handfuls of huckleberries as we watched ravens and red-tailed hawks ride the thermals below. Academic confirmation of these landscape lessons came from unique venues: special wild food programs sponsored by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and other regional organizations, taught by retired professors and earnest hippy biologists. Cumulatively, these experiences were the cornerstones of my early education and gave me insights that I still draw from as a professor and researcher today. I sincerely hope that future generations of children will be so fortunate as to experience this kind of hands-on learning upon the land and, through that process, gain a profound love and understanding of this verdant home of ours. If this book helps a parent usher even one child along a similar journey, I will consider the entire writing project a great success.
As I entered adulthood, though, I was disappointed to learn that the landscapes and plants that I valued so much were seen as an anonymous tangle to many Northwesterners, just so much green noise scarcely noticed as they motored past or bulldozed through. I increasingly sensed the nagging truth behind Lewis Mumford’s admonition that our national flower had become “the concrete cloverleaf” of the highway interchange, even here in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it is the fact that we Americans mostly descend from immigrant peoples, with relatively shallow histories in this far-flung corner of the continent. Perhaps it is the fact that we are largely children of an urbanized, industrial age, which has undervalued those resources that are local, wild, and free in exchange for those that are universal, interchangeable, and revenue-producing. Whatever the reason, I have long felt that there was a need to address our chronic dissociation from the landscape. A deeper appreciation of useful plants might help us to see that landscape anew and with greater interest and investment. Certainly, edible plants are all around us, a rich source of food, beauty, entertainment, enlightenment, and many other pleasures, if only we pay attention. Ironically, we are all inheritors of a great prosperity of which most of us know very little.
Well-intentioned people have sometimes called out in alarm when they have seen my children eat even the most common edible berries, astonished, grasping for their cell phones, unsure if they should first call a poison control center or child protective services. I appreciate their concern. Fortunately, the times are changing, and people are tentatively reconnecting to plants and places in myriad ways, with welcome energy and experimentation. Workshops, field trips, blogs, and any number of other venues are emerging, celebrating native foods as a solution to many of the economic, nutritional, and ecological challenges of the age. Perhaps, in time, those well-intentioned people with the cell phones and the angst will put down their phones, pick up a berry bucket, and harvest merrily alongside my kids. We will all be better for it.
In my quest to understand these matters, I had the opportunity to work with some of the best teachers available, both in the world of academia and among the Northwest’s Native American cultural leaders. I worked with outstanding biogeographers and ethnobotanists in universities in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and beyond, seeking an understanding of the natural history of the Northwest and the consequences of human activities on regional ecologies. I was also able to work with many great Native teachers—Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Tlingit, Coast Salish, Klamath, and many others—seeking to comprehend and help document their exceedingly rich repertoire of cultural knowledge related to plants. In time, I was adopted by more than one tribe, but most relevant here by the Kawakadillika clan of the Kwakwaka’wakw. Their chief, Kwaxistalla Adam Dick, has instructed me over the years with a mixture of chiefly generosity and paternal patience. Sequestered from the non-Native world as a child, Adam received from the elders of his day unique and focused training in all aspects of traditional resource management, from the mechanics of plant harvesting to the philosophical foundations of plant cultivation and associated rituals. These elders gave him this training, motivated by prophecies that through such an urgent educational undertaking they might ensure that their cultural knowledge survived into the modern day. I consider myself an enormously fortunate beneficiary of their efforts. So, too, readers of this book are beneficiaries, indirectly, of the labors of these elders hailing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, I have had to strike a balance, presenting what is common knowledge among traditional harvesters, while steering clear of the medicines, ceremonial uses, and other highly sensitive and proprietary forms of knowledge. There are no state secrets contained herein, but the content and perspectives of this book clearly bear the imprint of my own teachings from this rich and venerable tradition.
It is to my teachers and their teachers before them that I dedicate this book. For this reason, a specific portion of my proceeds from this book will be used to help support programs in the region with Native oversight that document traditional ecological knowledge and ensure its perpetuation for the benefit of future generations through educational programs for young people, both Native and non-Native. It is my hope that, through such efforts, we will continue to learn from the intimate relationships that human communities have maintained with Northwestern environments over the millennia, and this knowledge may yet inform modern people as we seek to make a sustainable home here in the Pacific Northwest, for the long haul.
The gathering of wild plant foods is a small business in a way—the plucking of a few trailside berries here and there as you pass by—but it is also part of something much bigger, the greater sweep of history and the fate of the region’s ecosystems. Either way, it is clear that we are in this together, from the tribal elders carrying forward ancient wisdom to the young foodies and bloggers whose experimentation adds spicy new ingredients to the mix. You can approach wild food gathering from whichever perspective you wish. Whatever your motivations, you are enthusiastically invited. Happy harvesting!
Table of Contents
Preface 8
Edible Plants of the Pacific Northwest: An Invitation 12
Wild Edibles Season by Season 36
Wild Edible Plants of the Pacific Northwest 41
balsamroot 42
big leaf maple 44
biscuitroot 47
black hawthorn 49
black huckleberry 51
black lichen 53
bog cranberry and lingonberry 55
bog huckleberry 57
bracken fern 59
bunchberry 62
burdock 64
camas 66
cattail 69
chickweed 72
chicory 74
chinquapin 76
chokecherry 78
coastal black currant 81
Coltsfoot 84
common plantain 86
cow parsnip 88
crabapple 90
dandelion 92
devil's club 94
dock 97
eelgrass 99
elderberry 101
evergreen huckleberry 104
fireweed 107
goosefoot 109
goosegrass 111
hazelnut 113
high-bush cranberry 115
Himalayan blackberry 117
horsetail 121
Indian plum 124
juniper 126
kinnikinnick 128
knotweed 130
lady fern 132
lamb's quarters 134
licorice fern 136
monkeyflower 138
mountain ash 140
nodding onion 142
oak 144
Oregon grape 147
oval-loafed blueberry and Alaska blueberry 149
oxalis 151
Pacific waterleaf 153
pickleweed 156
pine 158
pipsissewa 164
prickly currant 166
red currant 168
red huckleberry 170
salal 172
salmonberry 175
seaside arrowgrass 178
seaweed 180
serviceberry 184
sheep sorrel 186
shepherd's purse 188
Siberian miner's lettuce 190
silverweed 193
Sitka spruce 195
skunk cabbage 199
soapberry 201
spiny wood fern 203
springbank clover 205
sticky gooseberry 207
stinging nettle 209
stink currant 212
stonecrop 214
sword fern 216
tarweed 218
thimbleberry 220
thistle 223
trailing wild blackberry 225
trapper's tea and Labrador tea 227
tule 229
violet 231
wapato 233
watercress 236
wild chamomile 238
wild ginger 240
wild lily 241
wild lily-of-the-valley 246
wild mint 249
wild raspberry 251
wild rose 255
wild strawberry 259
yampah 262
yarrow 265
yellow pond-lily 268
yerba buena 270
Metric Conversions 273
Recommendations for Further Reading 274
Acknowledgments 277
Photography Credits 278
Index 279