I spent 40 years telling people what things are worth. Then I valued my own back garden. It came to $312.

One book. 84 plants. About $312 a year, growing in an ordinary yard.

Digital field guide · 300+ pages · First Edition

The complete valuation of an ordinary backyard.

Dandelion coffee. Nettle soup. Elderberry syrup. The salve that grows flat against your path. 84 plants photographed, checked against their poisonous doubles, and given honest dollar values, with three indexes to find them by. Most gardens hold twenty to thirty of them. The by-value index tells you which ten to learn first.

$47 $173 First Edition launch price

What you get for $47

The Backyard Goldmine · 300+ pages, 84 plants, three indexes

$47

The Harvest Wall Calendar · twelve printable month pages

$29

The Ten Impostors Chart · one printable safety sheet

$29

The Remedy Shelf Recipe Book · thirty-seven one-page recipes

$29

The Garden Walk Video Collection · a backyard valued on camera

$39

Total value

$173

You pay today

$47

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A Valuer Looks at a Lawn

I was an auctioneer and valuer for forty years. House clearances, mostly. I have stood in a thousand kitchens with a clipboard while a family waited to hear what the sideboard was worth.

Here is what forty years of that teaches you. People throw value away because nobody ever told them what it was.

The sideboard they nearly skipped goes for four hundred. The box of "old junk" under the stairs pays for the funeral. It happened every month of my working life. Not because people are careless. Because value is invisible until someone points at it.

The year I retired, I watched my neighbour come home from the pharmacy with a small paper bag. Elderberry syrup, for her chest. Eighteen dollars. We stood talking by her fence, and the whole time, over her shoulder, an elder tree at the bottom of her garden was holding about thirty dollars of the same berries at eye height.

She had lived in that house for thirty years. Nobody had ever pointed.

So I did what valuers do. I catalogued. Two years, my own half acre and every hedge and verge within walking distance, cross-checked against the old herbals and the prices at the health shop in town. I wrote down every plant an ordinary person can find in an ordinary backyard, what it is good for, when to take it, how not to poison yourself, and what the same thing costs when a shop puts it in a jar.

The catalogue became this book.

The Book

The Backyard Goldmine is a field guide to 84 plants. Not rare ones. Not ones you trek for. The ones coming up between your paving slabs and along your fence right now.

Every plant gets a full entry, laid out the same way every time, because a reference you cannot find your way around is a doorstop. Each entry gives you:

• Photographs. Whole plant, leaf, and the part you harvest. Real photographs, in colour. Line drawings are how mistakes get made.
• The Marks. Three to five identification points, in order of certainty. The things I would check before bidding, so to speak.
• The Lookalike. If it has a dangerous double, the double is right there on the page, side by side, with the tell-apart marks in red. Not in an appendix. On the page, where you need it.
• The Uses. What people have used it for, for centuries, in plain speech. Teas, salves, tonics, vinegars, and good eating.
• The Harvest. Which month, which part, and what it looks like when it is ready.
• The Value. What the same thing sells for, dried, bottled, or fresh, at today's prices. On a gold rule at the foot of every entry. My trade, applied to your garden.

The Page I Care Most About

Before anything else, the safety of the thing.

Some of the most useful plants in this book have doubles that can put you in hospital, and one or two that can do worse. Wild carrot has a double. Elder has a double. The onion smell test for wild garlic exists because the lookalike does not smell of onions and does not forgive.

Most guides handle this with a warning paragraph somewhere near the back. I think that is how accidents happen.

In this book, every plant with a dangerous double carries a lookalike panel on its own page. Two photographs, side by side. The safe plant on the left. The impostor on the right, in red. Under each, the marks that separate them, written for a person standing at a hedge with the book in one hand.

What Is in It

A sample of the 84, with the page they are on:

• The yellow flower you have been fighting every summer for twenty years. Dried and sold, the root fetches $28 a pound, and a decent lawn holds about $60 of it a year (page 41).
• The sting that pays rent. Nettle leaf sells for $26 a pound dried, and the young spring tops are better eating than the spinach you paid $4 a bag for (page 47).
• The berry your grandmother made into winter syrup, $18 a bottle at the pharmacy, roughly $2 to make at your stove (page 63).
• The "weed" growing flat against your path that old field hands called the first aid kit, and why a $12 tin of its salve is one of the easiest things in the book to make (page 55).
• The lawn invader whose blossoms sell for $35 a pound to tea blenders, which is more per pound than the beef you had on Sunday (page 71).
• A salad plant you have pulled up a hundred times that growers now sell to restaurants at $8 a bag, thriving in the worst soil in your garden (page 59).
• The tall roadside candle the old herbals kept for chesty winters, $30 a pound dried, impossible to mistake for anything once you know its one mark (page 77).
• The hedge fruit with three times the vitamin C of an orange, ready in the exact month the weather turns on you (page 83).
• The tree on your street whose spring needles made the tea that kept sailors alive, free in any month with an R in it (page 95).
• What to do with acorns besides curse them. The flour is real food and the method is two steps and patience (page 101).
• The garden escape that draws every bee in the county and sells, dried, for more than the plant cost at the nursery in 1998 (page 89).
• The one in the damp corner that closes small cuts, and the reason barbers grew it by the door (page 93).

And 72 more, each one photographed, valued, and checked against its double.

The Three Indexes

Forty years of catalogues taught me that a reference book is only as good as the way in.

So this one has three.

Who Is Telling You All This

My name is Malcolm Ashby. I am sixty-eight. For forty years I was an auctioneer and valuer, the man in the tweed at estate sales, telling families what the contents of a house would fetch.

Valuing is a habit that does not retire when you do. I catalogue things. It is the only way I know how to look at the world. When I finally had time for my garden, I catalogued that too, and what I found there embarrassed me. A man who could price a Georgian side table across a dark room had been paying the health shop for dandelion root while treating his own supply with weedkiller.

My grandfather knew every plant in this book. He was not unusual. Everyone's grandfather did. Two generations later that knowledge is nearly gone, not because it stopped being true, but because nobody wrote it down where ordinary people would read it, with photographs, and prices, and the dangerous ones marked in red.

So I wrote it down. It took two years. It is the most useful thing I have ever put my name on.

Four Things I Am Putting In Free

The Harvest Wall Calendar. Twelve printable pages, one per month, showing every plant in the book that is ready that month and which part to take. Pin it in the kitchen. It is the difference between a book you read once and a book you use all year. Printable at home. A $29 thing, free.

The Ten Impostors Chart. One printable sheet. The ten most dangerous lookalikes in the book, side by side with the safe plant they imitate, and the tell-apart marks in red. Pin it inside the shed door. Some people will get more from this one page than from the whole book, and I am at peace with that. A $29 thing, free.

The Remedy Shelf Recipe Book. Thirty-seven recipes from the book's plants, kept the way my grandmother kept hers. The tea, the salve, the syrup, the tonic wine. One page each: what to pick, what to add, how long it keeps. A $29 thing, free.

The Garden Walk Video Collection. I walk an ordinary suburban backyard and value it plant by plant, on camera, so you can watch the marks checked in moving pictures before you trust them at your own hedge. A $39 thing, free.

The Offer, Plainly

This is the First Edition. When it sells through, I will correct whatever needs correcting, add what readers ask for, and the Second Edition will cost more, because it will be worth more. That is the entire urgency of this page. I am a valuer, not a carnival. There is no clock ticking anywhere on it.

The Guarantee

Questions People Ask Before They Buy

Is this a printed book that comes in the mail?

No. It is a PDF you download the minute you pay. You print it at home if you want it on paper, and most readers do. There is no printer, warehouse, or postman between us, which is how $173 of catalogue costs $47. The last guide I priced against this one charges about the same by the time you have paid the postage, and it stops at the plants.

Will these plants actually be in my yard?

The book covers the common backyard and hedgerow plants of the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia, and I stayed away from anything you would need a national park for. You will not have all 84. Nobody does. A typical suburban garden holds twenty to thirty of them, and the by-value index will tell you within an hour which ones you have.

I am not good with computers.

If you can open an email, you can open this. You pay, an email arrives, you press the link, and the book opens. It works on a computer, a tablet, or a phone. If you get stuck, write to me and we will sort it out between us.

Is this safe? I have read stories about foragers.

The stories are usually about people who were certain and wrong. This book is built to keep you from being either. Every dangerous double is photographed beside the plant it imitates, the marks are written in red, and the first rule of the book is that if you are not certain, it stays in the ground. Start with the plants that have no dangerous double at all. There are plenty.

Are the dollar values guaranteed?

They are honest current retail prices for the dried herb, the syrup, the salve, or the fresh-market equivalent, the way a valuer prices any lot, and like any valuation they move with the market. The point of the values is not that a broker will hand you $312. It is that you stop paying those prices for things standing in your own garden.

What if it is not for me?

Sixty days, money back same day, keep the book. The previous section says it all.

The Last Word

My whole working life, the saddest thing I saw was value going in the skip because nobody pointed at it in time. A garden is the same estate sale, running every year of your life, and most people never get a valuation.

This is yours. It costs less than the syrup and the salad and the tea you will buy this month anyway.

P.S. The dandelions you have been fighting all these years are on page 41. They were on your side the whole time.