This little book, edited by Steve Kemp, contains a wealth of information on the plants used by the Cherokee of western North Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. The information was gathered by William Banks in the early 1950s, while he was working on his M.S. degree at the University of Tennessee under Dr. Aaron Sharp. In order to document the traditional uses of local plants, he lived on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in western North Carolina for a period of three months, and developed a network of over a dozen informants.