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What are your favourite edible mushroom and wild plant identification books, and which ones are not worth the paper they are printed on? I collect wild plums, cherries, hazelnuts etc, but would love to be more adventurous without risking health. amazon seems to have a huge selection and its really hard to tell which will be any good.

Many thanks
Lisa

I grew up using the Mitchell Beazely books (both full sized and pocket sized) but everytime I have been on holiday in recent years the Collins Nature Guides seem to have been on special offer so I now have virtually the full range of these.  Collins also do Wild Guides and well - I have the Nature Guide - Trees and the Wild Guide - Trees.  IMHO (it's catching) the Nature Guides are superior to the Wild Guides.

There is a book called 'the easy edible mushroom guide' by David Pegler about 15 quid or so.

Just make sure you're 100% sure of what you're picking though and dont make the same mistake what a woman did a couple of years back... she picked what she 'thought' was a field mushroom.   It turned out to be a Amanita Phalloides known by its common name as the death cap.   She luckily survived though.

Mark

Ah, wild mushrooms: one of my favorite subjects!

I use a collection of guides including:

"The practical mushroom encyclopedia" by Peter Jordan & Steven Wheeler (excellent)
"Wild Food" by Roger Phillips (excellent)
"Food for Free" by Richard Mabey (excellent)
"Mushrooms (DK handbook)" by Thomas Laessoe  (good ID book for beginners)
"Wild Mushrooms" by Nigel & Marie-France Addinall (not the best book, but has some good recipes)

This is a list of just a few of the books I use. To identify mushrooms safely its best to use a range of guides, some guides can be particularly bad for certain species so it pays to use a range.

The bountiful seasons just beginning and I'm already harvesting boletus and waxcaps.

Anyway, have fun mushroom picking!

Truffle

I have two; Collins' 'Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools' and the 'Penguin Nature Guides' book on 'Fungi of Northern Europe' in two volumes. Both are good, but if you don't want Latin names etc. (I wouldn't be happy without them) look elsewhere. Many years ago, I once spent a whole summer camping out, and gathering as much food as I could. I are loads of fungi, and never even picked anything nasty-tasting.

For identification which do you find best, photographs or illustrations? (The mushroom guide I used to use in South Africa was photographic).

I would love to be able to go on a mushroom forage with an expert. I am sure there must be loads of edible mushrooms and toadstools near where I live.

I have been on several walks with an expert. He would show us one that he said was particularly good to eat & we thought "Ah, great!" Five minutes later he would find one that looked identical, that was deadly, & so the conclusion I came to was that I would only collect anything that an expert told me at the time was edible. So there you go!

In that case Glenys I would definately want an expert with me! :o

I haven't tried a photo guide; paintings are perfectly adequate as long as they're good quality, as they normally are.

As long as they are good and show what they need to show then it does not matter whether they are illustrations (Mitchell Beazely - Good Drawings) or photos (Collins - Good clear photos but more angles or focusing on important detail would be handy)