Member-only story
Rediscovering the Lost Art of Foraging
Free Food Found Near You, By You
It started when a friend and I were leaning over my veranda railing and looked down on weeds taking over the grass, sown by the previous owner of my house. Not mowing my lawn had given a whole lot of ‘weeds’ a chance to pop up and present themselves to air and sunlight. ‘You can eat those,’ my friend said, pointing at a nondescript plant with large green leaves. She told me it was burdock.
I got excited. I’m a dreadful gardener. I can keep houseplants alive, but what grows in the garden need to be plants that can fend for themselves. So, having a vegetable garden is not really my thing. But wild plants as free food? It doesn’t get better than that.
I had always felt drawn to the idea that I might be able to pick a salad from a field full of flowers and ‘weeds’. As a teenager, I dried lavender picked from my parents’ manicured garden, hung upside down from my 1980s bedroom ceiling in little bunches. I even went as far as gathering chamomile flowers from high grass just outside the boundaries of the town I grew up in. I’d make tea out of them by steeping them in boiling water. Then I moved to a big city to study, and after a while the only places I foraged were supermarket isles. Deep down, I know I missed the intimacy with wild things. Once upon a time, we all knew how to…
