The Lost Book Of Remedies Review

Features

The Medicinal and Healing Properties of Your Garden

This book is a little treasure that helps you to reconnect with Mother Nature. It's an herbal guide that contains encyclopedic knowledge regarding the different plants in your backyard, along with their healing and medicinal properties. Like a traditional field guide, the book is printed with pictures to help you identify the plants.

The guide comes with information regarding which plants can be eaten and which can't. Should you find yourself foraging in the wilderness to survive, you'll know what's safe to eat. It's probably best to be careful about what you eat in the wilderness if you don't absolutely have to forage, though, even with the book on hand.

Some of the plants in the book are weeds, so it can be difficult to locate and identify them. But one of the most striking gems is that the author has included guidelines for growing the plants in your backyard. Not every plant can be put in a garden, but some native wildflowers and other flora would look gorgeous taking over your lawn.

After you've grown your own supply of medicinal herbs, the book walks you through information regarding how to preserve and harvest them for the future. You're given all the information necessary to create home remedies for a variety of different ailments.

Some of that may sound like pseudoscience, but these plants are actually the same materials that modern medicines are derived from! The compounds in the plants work the same way that medicines do. If you're dealing with a serious ailment or a bacterial infection, a visit to the doctor's office is always the safest bet, but this book helps you treat the sniffles right from home.

In addition to flowers, grasses, and other forms of low vegetation, the book is packed with information about different trees. It teaches you which trees produce edible fruit, bark, or leaves. It also breaks down the trees by the medicinal properties found in each part, so you learn how to utilize everything from the leaves to the roots.

More Than a Field Guide

There are dozens of wildlife guides that will help you identify plants through scientific descriptions and photographs. They might even have information about the plant's healthy properties, depending on whether you're using a specialized guide. But the Lost Book of Remedies is the first guide I've found that takes you all the way from planting to treating.

Like a field guide, the book gives an in-depth explanation of each plant and ways to identify them. It assumes zero prior knowledge on the reader's part, so you don't have to worry that you need a strong background in botany.

Different plants are separated into categories like their locations and types. By separating the plants like this, you can easily identify their purpose by section.

But once the book has brought you through the plant identification process, it teaches you how to prepare each of the home remedies using the plant. This is great for me! Sometimes my friends will tell me that certain herbs are healthy, and all I can think is, "Am I supposed to eat it? Drink it? Rub it on my skin? Give me some guidance!"

Some of the plants in the book are meant to be made into a poultice that can be applied to the skin or small surface wounds. Other plants must be boiled or cooked before they can be used as remedies. The book walks you through each step of the preparation process and then explains how to use the finished product.

That's right: Rather than leaving you out to dry, the author has provided information regarding how often the medicine should be applied, what dosage you should use, and any special considerations regarding the treatment. Because the recipes are so precise and based in centuries of medicinal use, it's a lot easier to be confident in this book than in vaguer musings.

Cool Fact Examples

Regardless of how proficient you are at wilderness plant identification, you're definitely going to learn something new. Every time I opened the book to a new page, I kept getting surprised by how strange and beautiful the world is! I learned what plants I can eat in the woods, what plants I should avoid at all costs, and what would help with mild aches and pains.

The page about cattails taught me that the grasses are edible. My son always says that they look like sausages, and I guess that's true! I don't think they'll taste much like sausage, though. Not only can you snack on cattails, but they can be harvested and used to cure serious infections of the skin.

The stem and roots of the plant are both edible. But the substance around the leaves that looks similar to jelly isn't. The book is detailed enough to specify this, and then to reassure you that the jelly won't poison you. It does have a numbing effect, and it can cure fungal infections in the nails and feet.

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