Books worth reading #7: Collins Nature Guides

There are a great many guide books available to the amateur naturalist. However, I particularly recommend the Collins Guides for the beginner. I have several of these and I've found them to be very useful over the years.

They don't provide any more or any different information than any other book but I do like the way the books are laid out. 

Take the Wild Flowers book in particular - it's arranged in flower colour-coded sections that quickly allow you to zero in on a species. As a field guide the book is excellent and the text that accompanies each description helps you to ensure you have the right plant.

As an aside I will just mention plant identification apps for your phone. On the whole they're not bad and, if all you plan to do is identify plants, they're more than adequate. However, I would not recommend them for foraging as they rarely provide a 100% identification. 

If you want to take wild food seriously you have to 'do the knowledge'. You have to study the plants and get to know petal shapes and formations, stem structure, leaf patterns ... all of the things that lead to a certain identification. An app makes it all too easy and is fraught with danger. 

As Mike (Atomic Shrimp) Walter says in the video below, it's a bit like sitting an exam and having a mate whispering the answers to you. You're not learning anything. Would you eat a wild plant solely on the recommendation of a stranger? 

My advice is, use an app if you like but back it up with observation. And that's where a good pocket guide will help you. 

Here's Mike testing three popular free plant identification apps. You'll quickly see that they have some issues.

   

Go and buy a book!