Łuczaj & Szymański recently published a review of the literature concerning wild edible plants of Poland, including a list of species which have been consumed in Poland over the last 200 years 1. During the literature search for this review, vast amounts of unpublished archival material on the gathering of wild plants were discovered (stored in universities, museums, the Polish Folklore Society in Wrocław, and the office of the Ethnographic Atlas of Poland in Cieszyn) in the form of questionnaires and field notes from various ethnographic studies 1. The main problem encountered in the analysis of such archival ethnographic descriptions (both published and unpublished) is the lack of corresponding herbarium specimens enabling the verification of plant identification. However, one set of data was found which did not have this flaw and was richly documented by dried plant specimens, constituting one of the most important ethnobotanical sources in Poland. It was a set of questionnaires from the Polish Ethnographic Atlas, 1948, stored in the Polish Ethnographic Atlas office in the University of Silesia (Cieszyn), with a small subset found in the archive of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, stored as "Odpowiedzi na ankietę nadesłane przez Koła Krajoznawcze Młodzieży Szkolnej", archive no. KKMS 317–332.

The Polish Ethnographic Atlas is unique among European ethnographic atlases, in its extensive coverage of many ethnobotanical topics. This large-scale ethnobotanical research was initiated and carried out by its first director, Józef Gajek, and then continued by his successors Janusz Bohdanowicz and Zygmunt Kłodnicki 2345. Although the undertaking of the Atlas was to describe all aspects of Polish folklore, its first four questionnaires concerned the use of wild edible plants (Questionnaires 1 and 2) and medicinal plants (Questionnaires 3 and 4) only. These four questionnaires were used together. They were filled in by a range of correspondents of the Polish Folklore Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze), who interviewed local people, and sent the results back to the Polish Ethnographic Atlas office. In this study only Questionnaires 1 and 2 were analysed.

Questionnaire 1 was an empty table with two columns, one for local plant names and the other for the plant part used. Questionnaire 2 was used to provide more information on particular species, so questions about each species occupied two pages, including a space in which to attach a small herbarium specimen (Table 1). In reality some respondents sent both Questionnaire 1 and 2, and some only Questionnaire 1 or only 2, so the depth of information concerning particular places varies. Altogether, 77 completed copies of Questionnaire 1 (62 in Cieszyn and 15 in Kraków) and 423 completed copies of Questionnaire 2 (all in Cieszyn) containing information on edible plants were found. Several copies of Questionnaires 1 and 2, which had been mistakenly used, instead of Questionnaires 3 and 4, to record data on ethnomedicine, and records on collecting fungi (in 19 copies of Questionnaire 1) were discarded. Only 235 copies of Questionnaire 2 had herbarium specimens attached to them and many specimens were of bad quality, as they were collected by non-botanists (usually one shoot or one leaf, rarely flowers).

All the correspondents, whose details had been given in Questionnaire 2, were local, either living in the village (or town) which they wrote about (47 people) or in a nearby town (8 people). Most correspondents sent a set of questionnaires concerning one place only, apart from three people who supplied information for one or two more places. Most of those whose profession is known were teachers (22) and farmers (8), but at least three students, three priests, two officials, two lawyers, a group of scouts, a forester, a museum director and a director of a cultural centre also took part in the study. Hiking clubs for young people (Koła Krajoznawcze Młodzieży Szkolnej) from Kraków area also took part in the study supplying fifteen copies of Questionnaire 1. Apart from using their personal experience of living in the given place, the participants interviewed between one and six, usually elderly, people (mean number 2.5, modal value 2). It was not stated by the interviewers where the conversations with local people took place (indoors or outdoors) or if herbarium specimens were collected during the interviews or after. From context it can be presumed that both situations occurred.

The information contained in Questionnaires 1 and 2 (together with later data) has been, so far, used in three published maps of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas 2, i.e. in the map of the use of tree sap (no. 311), bread additives (no. 322) and Vaccinium uliginosum (no. 310). Twelve maps (no. 356–367) documenting the use of 15 taxa are still awaiting publication 3. The Polish Ethnographic Atlas team was more interested in widely used species, the ways in which they were used and their local names and regional differences, than in tracking ethnobotanical curiosities used in a few villages. The number of questionnaires returned was not sufficient to construct detailed maps, which was the main objective of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas, so another study of wild edible plants was launched in 1964–69. This time it was done within a large project on all aspects of material culture, studied in a pre-selected grid of over 300 villages (Questionnaire 6). The questionnaire concerned was over a hundred pages long, which was the reason why it was often filled in hastily and superficially. No herbarium specimens were collected at that time 45.

Questionnaires 3 and 4, concerning the use of medicinal plants had already been used by Paluch 6 in his review of Polish ethnomedicine, but only information about the more commonly used species was published.

It seems that there was insufficient contact with botanists during the course of work on the Polish Ethnographic Atlas concerning ethnobotanical issues, as many herbarium specimens were incorrectly identified (sometimes even the genus being wrongly identified) and some botanical mistakes appeared in publications, e.g. confusion between Chenopodium and Origanum, due to their similar Polish names 4, or the assumption that all oset species belong to the scientific genus oset (Carduus), when the herbarium specimens and other studies clearly showed that most plants called oset belong to the genus Cirsium 4. These few mistakes, however, do not diminish the great effort put into the documentation of the use of plants, and the professionalism shown in constructing the questions, especially for Questionnaire 2 (Table 1).

Summing up, why is this set of documents so important to ethnobotany?

1. It was collected in 1948, just after World War II, when the memory of famine plants was fresh and poverty preserved gathering traditions.

2. It is one of the earliest examples of a purely ethnobotanical herbarium in Europe.

3. It uses free lists of plants; which constitute a very valuable resource for ethnobotanical research 78, as no species or mode of use had been pre-suggested.

The aim of this study is to present the content of Questionnaires 1 and 2, with particular attention paid to:

1. rarer species, whose use had not previously been reported in Poland.

2. assigning specific scientific names to folk taxa, previously referred to in ethnobotanical literature by only, or mainly, folk generic names (e.g. rdest, mięta, oset, mlecz, szczaw, ślaz)

3. finding places with a high incidence of the use of wild edible plants.

The geographical and historical background of the use of edible plants in Poland was sketched in an earlier study 1. The most important point for a reader of this study is that, in terms of ethnography and rural culture, Poland can be divided into three zones (Fig. 1):

• the Carpathians, a conservative traditional area, subject to the largest amount of ethnographic studies,

• the western and northern outskirts of Poland (Ziemie Odzyskane, i.e. Reclaimed Lands), largely ignored by ethnography, as they were reclaimed from Germany after World War II, and are inhabited mainly by Poles moved from the Soviet Union after WWII, with a small scattering of Poles and Germans who lived there before 1939 (most Germans or people of mixed origin left for Germany),

• the rest of Poland (lowland Poland), where rural culture has been studied in the most interesting regions, but on the whole less intensely than in the Carpathians.

A database was created to analyse the content of the questionnaires. When a species from the same locality occurred in both Questionnaire 1 and Questionnaire 2 (which was usually the case), the presence of the species was calculated only once. Exactly 1000 (species × locality) records occur in the database. All herbarium specimens were examined and the taxa which were harder to identify were cross-checked with the plant taxonomist, Dr Krzysztof Oklejewicz (Rzeszów University).

Folk names used in the questionnaires often refer to the whole genus. Particular scientific species names were assigned to them when:

1. they represented a monospecific genus in a given region (distributions were checked with Zając and Zając's Atlas 9),

2. other species of the genus were extremely rare in Poland,

3. all the herbarium specimens for the genus were identified as the species in question, and the field experience of the author suggested that the records unsupported by herbarium specimens contain the same species.

Latin names of plants are listed according to Flora Europaea 10, and main synonyms are given, including the name in the current checklist of Polish vascular plants of Poland 11 and older names used in the analysed materials. All local names occurring in the questionnaires are given as well.

Lists of edible plant species were made for 95 different places (Fig. 1, Table 2), nine of these lists, however, included only one or two species and were excluded from statistical analysis, as they contained obviously superficially collected material. The remaining 86 localities, each with a list containing three or more species, were divided for the purpose of analysis into three main regions: the Carpathians, yielding 19 localities, Ziemie Odzyskane – 20 and the rest ('lowland Poland') – 47.

There has been a strong emphasis in recent ethnobotanical literature on the quantification of results and the elimination of the publication of accidental findings based on information gathered from single individuals. Although each of the correspondents who sent questionnaires to the Polish Ethnographic Atlas sent information recorded from only one or a few selected people, the use of most species was documented from at least a few different locations, where data were collected by different researchers. Although reports of the use of species from one locality may easily be false, e.g. due to the inclusion of a mistaken herbarium specimen, I have provided exact locations of these species in order to enable verification of the information in the relevant locations with the local population, who may still remember the name of the folk taxa, even if the former use of plants has been forgotten.