Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America

Common Poisonous Plants by Dr. Nancy Turner is the top of the line field guide to deadly botanical beauties you could come across while exploring the great outdoors. This book is top quality in information, details, poisoning symptoms, and content! It is well worth the expense, which is a good amount. The book itself contains, plants, mushrooms, and fungi that could be hazardous to humans and animals alike. The main highlight, by far, is the toxicity section on each of the poisonous plants. The symptoms of ingestion, (contamination) are well described and could easily compell the reader to shudder. The symptoms are specific to every single plant, so that an infected person's life could easily and efficiently be saved. There is also a very helpful insight on treatment of potential poisoning. The book is so specific, it even tells you the degree of toxicity! Unfortunately, this book is very expensive and going out of print. So, any hardcore naturalist or interested botanist should purchase this online ASAP!

This is a beautiful book, both in the quality of the photos and the depth and readability of the information within. Perhaps its greatest strength is that it covers both native plant species and cultivated garden plants. This book is enough to convince any parent of the wisdom of edible plant gardening, and to shy away from the deadly, flashy ornamentals.

Dr. Turners books are without a doubt unparalleled regarding her ability to use the trust she has cultivated with the indigenous peoples of the PNW. This gives her an entirely unique and very interesting look at hows plant were used by the native populations of this and surrounding areas. The people who would find her writing fascinating would cut across many disciplines from of course not only botany but anthropology, archaeology, paleontology; perhaps even modern "new-age" religious seekers. Having said that though, I dearly wish she would quit deviating in to the field of mycology. I'm not exactly sure where she gets her info from, but I suspect that working under the auspices of the BC Provincial Museum, that she has elected to defer to the often antiquated mycological texts from the among the ranks of those in the possesion of professors in the back rooms of the museum that are gathering as much dust as are the books that they in turn rely upon for ID'ing the fungi.