I travel across Britain foraging wild food. Here’s what to look for, and where
04.10.2023 - 12:21
/ theguardian.com
Every autumn, my father would load our family of five into his already ancient 1928 Morris and set off from our home in Portsmouth. Laden, as we were, with baskets, boots, crooked walking sticks, gloves and Elastoplasts, we were off blackberry picking. Apart from annual trips to collect cockles from the mud of Langstone Harbour, I loved those early autumn days more than any other. Unlike school, early-1960s television and just about everything else, they felt so very real; not just athing to do but the thing to do.
Looking back, I think that we were revisiting the lives of our distant ancestors for whom foraging was an instinctive communal activity, one that nature rewarded with a sense of fulfilment and joy, and, in this instance, blackberries. Now those blissful days are mine every week, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends and family. However, it is still autumn that I yearn for – its sloes, crab apples, sweet chestnuts, hazelnuts, misty mornings and mushrooms.
My interest in foraging was a development of what I can only call an irritation with the natural world. I would find something on a walk and have no idea of its name, where it fitted into the world and, eventually, whether or not it was edible. I see this curiosity in the people that accompany me on my walks. Rust fungi, lichens, plant galls, earthstars, tree burrs and fallen beech branches mysteriously covered in matt-black “paint” (fungal pseudosclerotial plates, don’t you know) – all prompt questions. It is the slow, observant process of foraging that brings such marvels to their attention. “A walk will never be the same again,” is something I have heard a hundred times over the years – I always hope that it sticks.
Such days, such interest, are of course available to anyone sufficiently mobile and motivated. But where to go? Autumnal urban foraging is certainly possible – new-growth stinging nettles that have been cut back for the fourth time this year, plus the ubiquitous chickweed and hairy bittercress. There is also the occasional parkland sweet chestnut and always the abundant rose hips found on rose bushes of every kind.
But it is urban mushrooms that can shine. I have picked horse mushrooms in a London cemetery, fairy ring champignons in Edinburgh and parasols in Leeds. Old lawns can also provide a feast. Still, for abundance and variety, one must search out wild food in an appropriately wilder setting. My own haunts are now in West Dorset, its chalk downland, lowland pasture, hedgerows, small woods and the splendid coast. But I travel widely in the autumn, from the Channel Islands to Inverness. Wherever you are, old, well-grazed pasture and edge habitats, such as wood edges and clearings, hedgerows and pathways, are more