Harland, Gail – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Mon, 12 Aug 2024 21:42:24 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Harland, Gail – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 Snowdrop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/snowdrop/ Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/snowdrop/ Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated guide to the white and green sign of spring.

Elegant flowers dressed in simple white and green, snowdrops look far too fragile to deal with wintry weather. But that’s just what they do, and they have become treasured by horticulturalists for their ability to flower in the earliest parts of the year. In this book, Gail Harland explores the role snowdrops have played in gardens and popular culture alike, as a treasured genus for enthusiast growers and an important symbol of hope and consolation.
                     
Harland explores a variety of cultural meanings for the deceptively petit flower. In Victorian England snowdrop bands encouraged chastity among young women. They have been favorite subjects in paintings in many different eras, and today they are the iconic symbols of several hope-giving charities. Poets and writers have written extensively about them, as have pharmacists, who have used their chemical, galantamine, in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Today some of their rarer bulbs can fetch record-breaking sums, and annual festivals that celebrate them draw people from all over the world. Walking among their brilliant white beds, Harland offers an ideal companion for any plant-lover who has ever eagerly awaited this treasured sign of spring.   ]]> Foraging for Edible Wild Plants https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/foraging-for-edible-wild-plants/ Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/foraging-for-edible-wild-plants/ This book is a practical and attractive guide to the many edible varieties of wild plant. It will appeal to gardeners, botanists, cooks and foragers, and to anyone who wants to control invasive plants and weeds ecologically.

]]> Foraging for Edible Wild Plants is a practical and attractive guide to the many edible varieties of wild plant that grow all around us.  It will appeal to gardeners, botanists, cooks and foragers, and to anyone who wants to control invasive plants and weeds in eco-friendly ways.

Wild plants have many virtues. They are:  

  • Valuable for wildlife and beneficial insects.
  • Good for the soil – locking in nutrients
  • Helpful in the accumulation of trace elements in soil
  • Hosts for essential mycorrhizal fungi underground
  • Interesting and unusual ingredients in cooking

 

Foraging for Edible Wild Plants provides full details of over 50 edible species, with:

 

  • Illustrated notes on appearance and habitat
  • Valuable nutritional information
  • advice on how to cook them
  • numerous recipe suggestions for jams, cordials, pesto, salads and soups
  • fascinating historical facts
  • tips for non-culinary uses such as dyes from nettles and soap from soapwort
  • advice on controlling invasive species such as knotweed (eat them!)
  • identifying wild plants that are harmful if eaten
  • attractive colour photographs throughout.  

 Foraging for Edible Wild Plants covers both common plants, such as nettle, dandelion, chickweed and ground elder, and less common ones, such as brooklime and wintercress.

The author is a qualified dietician and horticulturalist, who puts her troublesome weeds to good use. Put Foraging for Edible Wild Plants on the bookshelf to do the same and welcome some new, plentiful edibles into the kitchen.

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