A Sampler of Wayside Herbs – Barbara Pond

This book was published out of Connecticut in 1974. I tend not to go for reference books that old, but when I saw this in a used bookstore on Cape Cod, I had to pick it up, since the name of my wildflower blog is Wayside Flowers. The serendipity was a little bit too much in evidence for me not to snag it.

The book has lovely plates of a number of flowers I’m constantly running into, that we now consider weeds, but were by and large brought over by the original New England colonists because they were useful. It’s a nice to see those old uses acknowledged.

It’s also somewhat of a hoot to see easy evidence of how much plant classifications change – probably half of the family names listed here are completely obsolete. (Actually, the general conventions are obsolete – family names now end in –aceae. In the book, they’re using the –itae format for a number of the families, though there are some –aceae’s.) I do get a kick out of seeing how much things are constantly changing.