Durango forager, grower, educator and plant expert Katrina Blair – who founded the local nonprofit Turtle Lake Refuge – has been in love with wild edible plants for most of her life.

She knew that at some point, she would probably write a wild food guidebook. But first, she wanted to address what she saw as a more urgent topic: wild weeds.

“It felt like the weeds needed to be highlighted first,” she said. “It was just this desire to point out this amazing resource available to all of us that is often neglected.”

So when she was contacted by Chelsea Green Publishing a couple years ago with an offer to write a book, she jumped at the chance. She already had the book in her head; it just needed to be written.

Blair’s book, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Plants for Human Survival, was released Nov. 1. Blair, who is on the heels of a six-week book tour around the country, will be talking about it and signing copies during an author event Thursday at Maria’s Bookshop.

In Wild Wisdom, Blair spotlights 13 beneficial edible weeds that are found in human-disturbance zones all over the world – from the Arctic Circle to Japan and Colorado. The book highlights their medicinal and nutritional qualities, gives tips on harvesting them and offers more than 100 recipes for incorporating them into a diet.

The book, Blair says, is more than just a field guide to wild edibles: It’s a global plan for better food security and land stewardship and, she hopes, an inspiration for people to reconnect with the natural world.

“Weeds are a direct connection with nature,” she said. “I think by getting connected to them by appreciation, we’ll just naturally become better stewards of the land.”

Blair also hopes to spark a 180-degree shift in the way people perceive weeds.

“Let’s not kill them; let’s celebrate them,” she said.

In the book, Blair extols the virtues of dandelion, mallow, purslane, plantain, thistle, amaranth, dock, mustard, grass, chickweed, clover, lambs-quarter and knotweed. Blair walks the reader through each plant, delineating its beneficial properties before offering recipes for soups, smoothies, seed butters, tinctures and toothpastes. The recipes cover the gamut, from dandelion pesto to amaranth porridge, mallow mint ice cream and curly dock lasagna.

The large book is part field-guide, part memoir and part philosophy – it also features photos, memories, illustrations, poems and contemplations on issues like permaculture and honeybee health.

Human use of these wild weeds makes sense for myriad reasons, Blair contends. They are readily accessible, they are nutrient-dense and they are free.

“These wild, resilient crops are so rich as a resource for food and nutrition,” she said. “And what I think came through more and more (during the research process) was that they can help us be self-reliant where we live.”

Wild weeds, Blair says, are hardy survivalists that offer a direct link to accessing the wild intelligence that resides in all of us. They aren’t the end-all answer to the daunting challenges facing humans, but they offer a step in the right direction.

“It’s a step toward a sustainable future,” she said.

Blair grew up in Durango and, aside from moving away to attend Colorado College and earn her master’s degree, has lived most of her life here. She began foraging for wild plants as a young adult, an endeavor that has evolved into multi-day “walkabouts” and led her to educating people about the benefits of wild foraging.

“The more of us humans who are eating wild, the more of a stronger advocate we can be for caring for the Earth,” she said.

Blair knows that many people harbor fears and reservations about eating wild. But in her teaching and traveling, she said, she has found that as soon as someone eats a wild-food treat, they change their mind pretty quickly.

“It really lights the fire in people. They go, ‘Ah, I get it,’” she said.

It proves the point of a painting that hung in her childhood home. As she recounts in the book, the painting featured a dandelion next to a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not as yet been discovered.”

kklingsporn@durangoherald.com

If you go

A book event with Katrina Blair, author of The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.