My top five, most important, always-off-the-shelf reference books that I use constantly in each of five categories: Herbalism, Cookbooks, Plants, Ecology, and Landscape Architecture. These are my most dog-eared, post-it-noted, stained, and written-in references.

Herbalism (ok, some are favorite authors):

• everything and anything by Matthew Wood
• many of Stephen Harrod Buhner‘s books
• Richard Mabey’s The New Age Herbalist
• Andrew Chevallier’s Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine
• Andrew Tillotson’s The One Earth Herbal Sourcebook

Cookbooks (ok, six here):

• Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything in the World
• Jack Bishop’s Vegetables Every Day
• Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Cooking
• 101 Cookbooks blogger Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday
• I LOVE Dina Falconi‘s self-published book Foraging and Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook, with exquisite and accurate painting-sketches of the plants for positive identification by Wendy Hollender. This is a book I wish I made, I love it so much.

Best Informational Cookbooks (see how I am so bad at math and snuck another category in here?):

• Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions
• Paul Pitchford’s Healing with Whole Foods

Plants (ok, six, plus more cheating with authors – wait, not that kind of cheating):

• Micheal Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants
• anything with Ken Druse behind the lens (The Natural Habitat Garden, The Natural Shade Garden)
• Piet Oudolf’s books (Dream Plants for the Natural Garden, Planting Design, Designing with Plants)
• Joseph Hudak’s Gardening with Perennials Month by Month
• Nancy Ondra’s Grasses
• Donald Leopold’s Native Plants of the Northeast

Ecology (ok, four then):

• Perlman and Milder’s Practical Ecology
• Richard Forman’s Land Mosaics
• Richard Forman’s Road Ecology
• Sim Van der Ryn’s and Stuart Cowan’s Ecological Design

Landscape Architecture (sort of, these are the guides I use to create my brand of it):

• David Jacke’s and Eric Toensmeier’s immense and awesome two-volume Forest Gardening
• Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden
• Patrick Whitefield’s How to Make a Forest Garden
• Stine’s Landscapes for Learning and Robin C. Moore’s Plants for Play

My most-read Journals:

• Orion
• Taproot
• Organic Gardening (I do not like all the ads, but I love supporting this family-founder of a movement)
• Journal of the American Herbalists Guild
• Acres
• I also get Landscape Architecture Magazine, but I never read it cover to cover like I do these others. I also have an in-procrastination-mood love for Moomah and Leaf, both online mags.