We’re heading down a dead-end road off U.S. Route 160 in northeastern Arizona. The landscape is semi-arid, dotted with sagebrush, junipers, and piñon pines.

Nine miles along the road we arrive at the visitor centre for Navajo National Monument.

From the rear of the small centre, a trail starts beside a Navajo hogan and a small sweathouse. The path leads gently downhill towards a deep canyon cut into the Shonto plateau rock.

Situated here is the remarkable Betatakin, “House Built on a Ledge” in Navajo. In Hopi, the place is called Talastima, or “Place of the Corn Tassel”. This is an Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling, built within a massive south-facing rock alcove.

I was struck by a paragraph on one of the information boards, under the heading Wilderness Skills.

“The Puebloans grew cotton, using dry-land and irrigated farming techniques; the climate then was much like today. They domesticated turkeys and dogs. They used everything the land provided; pinyon pine, prickly pear cactus, ricegrass, and sunflowers. Archaeologists discovered the remains of 400 different plants in Talastima/Betatakin – the people knew this land well.”

The figure of four hundred plants resonated with me. I’d seen or heard similar figures elsewhere.

Australian Aboriginals – Diversity of Available Plant Foods

In their 1998 paper Australian Aboriginal plant foods: a consideration of their nutritional composition and health implications, Brand-Miller and Holt write:

“The Australian bush contains thousands of edible wild plants, ranging from sweet and tangy fruits and starchy seeds to leaves, tubers, fungi and seaweeds. Early accounts of these plant foods can be found in the journals of European explorers, botanists. However, knowledge of their role in Aboriginal diets, especially in temperate Australia, is very incomplete.”

Later in the paper, they add the following, highlighting the consumption of hundreds of species of plant:

“Writers often comment on the wide range of vegetable foods available to hunter-gatherers which contrasts with the relatively narrow variety of crops produced by agriculture. Australian Aboriginals across Australia ate some 300 different fruit species and 150 varieties of roots and tubers. However, we do not know to what extent Australian Aboriginals exploited all the species available or limited themselves to an optimal foraging strategy based on relatively few species.”

In other parts of the world archaeology has helped piece together a picture of some wild food diets of the past.

Pre-Historic Britain – Diversity of Plants in Hunter Gatherer Diets

The figure of four hundred plants mentioned in Arizona reminded me of comments made by one of my wild food mentors, Professor Gordon Hillman. In a short segment of a TV show in the late 1980s, Gordon discussed the range of plant foods eaten by our hunter gatherer ancestors. The clip is embedded below.

The clip starts with Gordon peeling the root of sea club rush and explaining it is “one of many wild roots, seeds, other plant bits that would have been eaten by hunter-gatherer populations. Most of them would have eaten a good 400 or 500 different species of wild plant, some of them even a couple of thousand.”

So, here’s another reference to at least 400 plants being used.

The presenter expresses surprise at the diversity of plant foods, stating she would had imagined pre-historic hunter gatherer diets to be very monotonous.

Gordon replies “Quite the opposite. What’s happened is that through time, the range of different plant species that we’ve eaten, animal species too, has declined. In contrast, hunter gatherers, [ate an] enormously diverse range of different plants.”

The presenter asks Gordon how he knows that people ate this range of hundreds of wild plants.

Gordon explains there is a lot of evidence: “We’ve got charred remains from archaeological sites …Now, from these charred remains excavated from archaeological sites, we can work out what the foods were that they ate. And not only from the remains of the food plants themselves…But also from human faeces. And in these little fragments, we found literally hundreds of seeds, little bits of tuber, and so on. And from that, we know they ate these things.”

The full piece was centred around Lindlow Man, a bog body found in 1984 that generated a lot of media interest.

Four Hundred Plants is a Sub-Set

Returning to the “400 different plants in Talastima/Betatakin”, let’s look at the wider North American context for a moment.

Daniel E. Moerman’s Native American Food Plants contains more than 11,000 food uses of 1,866 plant species (mostly vascular plants and some non-vascular plants).

In North America there are more than 31,000 kinds of vascular plants. We know more than 1,500 of these were used as food by First Nations.

It should be obvious that not all of these plants occur in all parts of North America. It’s a large land mass with a diversity of ecoregions, each containing distinct assemblages of species. So, it should also be self-evident that no group of people used all the plants, or even had knowledge of them.

Regardless, wherever you look, people had a deep knowledge of the plants where they lived.

Under the section heading Appreciating the Common Knowledge of Our Past, Moerman writes “…in past times this was to a large degree the knowledge of ordinary people… part and parcel of everyday life. People walked in the world and saw plants they knew to be useful for various purposes. Their children learned of these matters as naturally as our children learn the names of baseball teams or athletic shoes or rock bands.”

Today it is still possible to have a deep connection with plants.

Monica Wilde – A Year Living On Wild Foods

Over a period from late 2020 to late 2021, Monica “Mo” Wilde lived exclusively on wild foods for a year. In Scotland.

Mo consumed well over two hundred wild plants and encountered more edible plants still. In addition, she ate scores of fungi species as well as over twenty species of seaweed. The year was documented in her book The Wilderness Cure. The plant, fungi and seaweed species are listed towards the back of the book.

Mo’s experiment highlighted that the benefits of ingesting wild foods go beyond simply providing calories and macronutrients. There were wide-ranging health benefits. This is something she has been investigating further via The Wildbiome™️ Project.

How Many Food Plants Are There?

Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World listed around 3,000 edible plants. But we now think there are over 7,000 edible plants. This number was derived as follows…

According to the 2020 World checklist of vascular plants, facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, there are 347,298 accepted species.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has also produced a “World Checklist of Useful Plant Species“. This includes 40,292 species with at least one documented human use.

From this database it is currently estimated that there are at least 7,039 edible plant species, which includes 7,014 vascular plants. This is a little over 2% of all vascular plants.

Plants As Medicine

Some of the four-hundred plants at Betatakin would have been used as medicine.

In Moerman’s Native American Medicinal Plants, he presents a catalogue of approximately 27,000 medicinal uses of 2,700 plant species in North America. There is considerable overlap with the species in Moerman’s Native American Food Plants.

To be sure, plants are often used for both food and medicine. In Kew’s database most of the 7,039 edible species mentioned above have additional uses, the most common being medicines (70%) and materials (59%).

Plants As A Material Resource

It will be no surprise to students of bushcraft or traditional living skills, that plants (including trees) are the potential source of materials for many practical items. These include, tinder, fuel, friction fire-making sets, cordage, nets, baskets, containers, bags, clothing, traps, throwing sticks, spears, bows, arrow shafts, shelter structures, shelter coverings, mats, bedding, and watercraft. Plants also provide dyes, paints, glues, soap, insect repellents, and fish poisons.

In Australian Plants as Aboriginal Tools, Philip A. Clarke focuses on material culture (rather than food and medicine). He characterises a relationship with plants deeper and more integrated than being simply a superstore of useful resources. The plants provide materials but also shape the culture. Further, the plants support, and are an integral part of, the ecosystem on which the people relied.

Four Hundred Plants is Ten Percent

Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany, which incorporates food and medicinal uses, and extends to include material uses, documents First Nations use of 4,029 kinds of plants with a total of 44,691 uses across 186 categories.

So, four-hundred plants for food, medicine and materials is but ten percent of Moerman’s total.

My view is that still makes for a favourable environment.

The Environment Dictates What’s Available

Not everywhere has four hundred useful, edible and medicinal plants available in the vicinity, or via trade with neighbouring groups.

Some environments have more, some have less. In some places, even if there is a lot of vegetation, more of the total plant mass is inedible (wood and cellulose-packed leaves for example), while in others there is lower species diversity.

In many environments, seasonality is a factor too, with not all resources being available all the time. This may entail a variety of different resources being sought out throughout the year to meet the same need (for example fibres for cordage sourced from tree bark in the spring but sourced from plant stems in the late summer and early fall). It may also mean that one resource, or set of resources, dominates at a particular time of year (e.g. berry season).

In a given environment, the plant species available clearly dictate what is possible in terms of plant usage. Lack of plant diversity doesn’t make life impossible, though.

Frank W. Marlowe in his book The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania reports “The Hadza diet consists of more than 880 species. The vast majority of species are mammals and birds.”

He also highlights that some of these foods have much greater weight in the Hadza diet than others. “In terms of frequency and in terms of kilograms or kilocalories (kcals), the diet is dominated by far fewer species.”

The Hadza, who maintain a hunter gatherer lifeway, eat a narrower range of plant foods than some groups, including 10 tubers, 10-12 species of berry, and baobab fruit. Even so, these foods are still very important. Despite the number of species of birds and mammals in the diet, Marlowe’s study showed meat contributed only 27.1% of the food brought into Hadza camps by weight. Berries were 28.5%, tubers 24.7% and baobab 11.5%. The remaining 8.1% was honey.

Marlowe further points out that not all food is consumed in camp. Berries in particular are often eaten directly off the bush, with him estimating 50% of berries being eaten out of camp. He also estimates 40% of honey, 25% of tubers, 20% of baobab and 15% of meat is eaten out of camp.

Marlowe’s ranking of the food types by kilocalories provided to the Hadza diet are, in descending order, berries, meat, baobab, tubers, then honey.

Even though the Hadza do not eat a vast range of plant foods, those that they do eat are very important, providing the bulk of their diet by both weight and by caloric intake.

Other plants are used for their tools such as fire drills, bows, axe handles, digging sticks and shelters.

Learn Common and Useful Plants

Do you need to learn 400 useful plants? Not necessarily, no. But if you are motivated to do so, you should. It will only enhance your enjoyment and appreciation of the natural world, as well as your practical abilities in the realm of bushcraft, survival and traditional living skills.

Whatever the number of plants you set out to become familiar with, you have to start somewhere. And it’s good to start with a plan.

Assuming you want to learn more about the plant (and tree) resources around you, my recommendation is to first focus on what is common in your area. Learn to identify what you see often. Be curious.

Focusing on plants you see often will provide more opportunities to learn and check your identification. Learning the most common plants in your area will provide you with a good starting framework to add less common species to your knowledge later on (if necessary or desired).

Also, focus on what’s useful in your area. If you’re lucky, this might be simply a subset of the common species. Otherwise, you might have to seek out less common species to satisfy a particular need (the shoot of a particular plant species for a hand drill, for example).

If you are learning to identify wild food plants, you should also learn to identify the poisonous species you are likely to come across in the same area. Some poisonous plants are very distinctive. Some might look like an edible species when both are young. Others might be similar to an edible species at all stages of development. Pay particular attention to the poisonous species that look like edible species. Be cautious. If you are unsure, don’t eat it.

Below I’ve included some useful resources on this site to get you started.

If you wish to take your tree and plant identification skills much further forwards in a structured way, with guidance from me, then please consider my online Tree and Plant Identification Masterclass. This is a 12-module course, delivered over a year. I lead the course online and you do the fieldwork close to your home, or at a venue that is convenient to you.

Additional Useful Resources On This Site

Ten Common European Poisonous Plants You Should Know
Foraging For Early Spring Greens: Some To Eat, Some To Avoid…
12 Easy-To-Forage European Plants For Spring And Early Summer
Ten Of The Best European Berries To Forage
In Search Of Winter Greenery: Twelve Candidates For Frosty Foraging
Five Survival Plants Every Forager Should Know

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Survival Foraging: A Realistic Approach
Boost Your Bushcraft With Urban Botany

Related Paul Kirtley Podcasts

PK Podcast 010: Alyssa Crittenden On The Hadza, Honey And The Human Diet
PK Podcast 015: John Rensten On Urban Foraging
PK Podcast 035: Anna Lewington On Adventures In Ethnobotany And The Bounty Of Birches
PK Podcast 040: Miles Irving On Wild Foods, Foraging, Health And Connecting With Nature
PK Podcast 50: Les Hiddins, The Bush Tucker Man