It’s not hard to learn about herbs yourself. If you’re worried about safety, start with the food-herbs, like chickweed and nettles and sow thistle and mustard and sorrel and violets, and, well, you get the picture. There are many more very safe and gentle herbs out there.

As far as mange goes, I would check out Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s books. Her Herbal Handbook for Dog and Cat and Cats Naturally would be very useful.

Learning about herbs is great fun.

If you haven’t found it yet, you might visit the “Herbwifery Forum” at http://herbwifery.org . I started it a little over a year ago as a place for grassroots herbalists to exchange information, and it’s grown into a really sweet little community with a lot of thoughtful discussion.

Rosemary Gladstar’s Family Herbal is the one I most often recommend to people just starting out. It’s a pretty, friendly, well-organized book — a good reference, with nice pictures. It gives you herbal approaches to common ailments, and nice recipes too.

If you want a more theoretical approach to herbal practice, Matthew Wood’s Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism is a really good foundation in vitalist energetics. (I think I would recommend this one more to someone who already has plenty of contact with the plants, and some experience using them.)

If you would rather have a book that has detailed information on the use of individual plants, the basic one is still Maude Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (Volume I & Volume II). It was first published in the 1930s in Britain, so it leaves out a few American herbs and some that have come into use more recently, but this book is a classic, and if you’re interested in knowing about plants you’re going to buy it sooner or later. (It’s available online, too.)

I’ve been thinking about starting a “recommended reading” part of this site. Maybe your question will motivate me…

The category link for sorrel leads back to this post because it’s the only mention of sorrel in all my posts. There will be more at some point I’m sure.

As far as pictures go, if you click on the latin name in the post, it will take you to Henriette’s Herbal, and she has pictures of a lot of plants (though not all).

Another useful source for plant information (including ranges) is the USDA Plants Database, though they don’t always have pictures either.

The Missouri Plants Database has nice pictures. And the Virginia Tech Weed Identification Guide can be useful for small, neglected plants (though the whole purpose of that guide is eradication, bleh).

Sometimes I just put the latin name of a plant in a google image search. That works too.