Edible Wild Plants
Edible Wild Plants – MORE than once I have been called to write the introduction to a book treating on some aspect of nature that was much in the line of my own interests; and usually had no difficulty in penning the few pages that were called for.
But the introduction to a book by Oliver P. Medsger proved a wholly different undertaking. Why this should be the case will be better understood when I describe my first meeting with his man of the woods.
It was at Woodland, New York, in the camp of Harry Little (Sagamore), that my good luck sent me out on a forest walk with Medsger; and every yard of our trip was made delightful by some bit of information about the myriad forms of wildlife around us forms with which I had been superficially acquainted all my life, but which I never really knew, because I had no exact names, no knowledge of their virtues.
It reminded me of an incident in my early life in the West. A prairie-born girl was asked by her mother what her dream of heaven would be. The child’s whole life had been in the home circle on the Plains; so she said simply: “Heaven is a place with a big shady tree, and an angel sitting under it, who never says, “I don’t know/ when asked a question.”
In my own childhood and youth, I suffered beyond expression from the knowledge-hunger, from the impossibility of learning about the abounding wild life around me. And now, when it seemed almost too late, I had found a competent guide.
