Foraging walk.
Abney Park Cemetery and Clissold Park foraging walk, with Flavour Fred.
George is a professional forager, who had his own wild food pub for 10 years, and now leads sessions on foraging for flavour. On a warm March Saturday afternoon, we met at Abney Park Cemetery - a green space in North East London - to go on a journey with George through familiar spaces to discover unfamiliar (or maybe primitively known) ingredients.
“As humans, our senses were developed first to assist us in hunting and gathering. Our perception of colour helped us pick the ripest fruit and tell the poisonous from the tastiest berries. The powerful link between smell and memory helped us remember those plants we had eaten safely before, and those we had been taught to fear. Your body hasn’t forgotten this: wild plants still provide a vivid and delicious feast for the senses.”
I’ve actually rarely visited this green space despite living on and off in this vicinity for coming up to 12 years. It is tucked away off Stoke Newington High Street and Church Street, with sort of circular paths, so it isn’t a space you can use as a thoroughfare. You have to go there intentionally. Having the opportunity to book something in then, holds you accountable.
On this particular Saturday I was so devastated by not being successful in a job interview that I needed to reconnect. The session was actually to be a 2 hour walk, with a couple of hours for foraged dinner and drinks, back at the organic garden I call my part-time place of work - and safe space - The Castle Climbing Centre. However, I just wanted the walk part, and being that I could attend for free (as I am staff of the space George was using, and essentially a guinea pig for the event), I was pleased to give myself over to trying something new in a fairly unknown place.
Over the last 3.5 years, diving into learning about plants on a more systemic level, I have improved my knowledge surrounding what’s around us. I can identify common plants, and could say some characteristics i.e. if they’re edible, if they could be used for dibre or dyes, if they’re a “weed”. But foraging isn’t something I do; I just don’t have the confidence - or indeed the planning to fit this into my life. I’m too much into convenience, even if I say I’m an explorer or experimenter elsewhere. So I was looking forward to almost testing what I know - gaining satisfaction from that - but learning additional bits to add to my repertoire, for days when maybe I do want to have a go. [Right at the start of the pandemic, I bought The Edible City, which highlighted general areas around London where you could forage ingredients, with subsequent recipes. I did the elderflower cordial, and then gave up, again because of planning reasons].
Foraging do’s and don’t’s.
George started by explaining that ordinarily you wouldn’t want to forage from old graveyards, such as Abney Park Cemetery. The reason being that back in the day, lead coffins and arsenic embalming techniques were used; though these are naturally occuring elements, both metals are known to be toxic in large quantities, and will be absorbed in to plant matter and local waterways. So, there’s simply no need to consume them unnecessarily.
Another no-go, is foraging plants or fruits too close to the ground i.e. within the “dog zone”. Dogs, foxes, humans… forage higher up and there’s less chance that something has defecated or urinated on the plant and fruit you’re about to eat.
Of course: know what you’re picking. There are so many toxic plants that have evolved to look like “nice” plants, because they want to reproduce. [Have you ever seen Little Joe? This is a terrifying film, sort of based on The Little Shop Of Horrors, about a flower that reproduces through controlling humans via the act of smelling.] One of these similarities is cow parsley and hemlock.
Cow parsley et al.
Also commonly known as Queen Anne’s Lace, Anthriscus sylvestris is a tall flouncy plant, part of the umbellifer family. While cow parsley is edible, the similar plant hemlock is poisonous. Fortunately they have distinct characteristics to help you identify them, but from the outset, all of these umbellifer plants look the same to everyday eyes. Cow parsley has a “celery” dip to the stalk, is hairy and ridged, while hemlock is round, smoother and with red splotches.
This was new knowledge to me, and I was gratified when I came across hemlock the next day. The article on Cow Parsley from Eat Weeds looked to be informative with images should you want to try to identify the differences (and similarities).
Alliums.
This family is one I am used to, because we have many varieties in the garden - wild garlic (ransome), garlic chives, chives, three-cornered leek. Recognising them is quite simple once you know, and then you see them everywhere “wild”, but if you were to just go around squishing plants you came across within a particular “classic” green shade (that’s how I see them anyway), and they smelled of garlic, you could assume they were an allium. The white flowers are another give away, if you were to simply go scouring some verges or forests - yet they are different for each variety, so not overly helpful.
You can, however, find garlic-smelling plants not in the allium family, such as Jack-By-The-Hedge (Garlic Mustard), Alliaria petiolata. Sometimes foraging knowledge can lead you easily to something else within that family, yet what I particularly like about foraging is the connection to what you can’t readily come up with answers for, like who is Jack and why is he by the hedge smelling and tasting of peppery garlic?
Trees.
We started getting in to trying some of George’s “wild booze”, which he kept in spray bottles in a first aid kit. Considering all of the plants around us were used medicinally before pharmaceutical companies came along to sell us unknown whatevers, this was actually a nice tongue-in-cheek FU, and goes back to what George says about flavour being an innate thing to help us survive. I guess though, I know what paracetomol tastes like, and don’t know the flavour of natural aspirin plant, so they’ve got me there.
The first photo shows a cherry-birch blend, licked underneath cherry and birch trees. Quite the setting! I think it’s this one - Aestas - containing cherry bark, birch bark, wood avens root and ground ivy; so all ingredients you would find harmoniously in the woods.
The photo on the right shows a larch pine shoot, completely new to me and honestly a flavour/texture I’ll never knowingly let enter my mouth again. The liqueur Heims is probably better than the single flavour (for me) probably because I wouldn’t be left with a furry mouth feel that the light citrus note just cannot beat. It contains Norwegian Spruce and Douglas Fir, but with cardamom and fennel so reckon it could bring situational delight, like on a cold winter evening. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the shoot, but was pleased to have learnt this information.
We later had a concoction - Ver - that used sweet woodruff and fig leaves as the base for a magical botanical liqueur that genuinely tasted of apple strudel. And then upon finding hogweed, we nibbled some saved hogweed seeds, which to me tasted specifically of blood orange, but to others have varying degrees of orange intensity.
I wondered, if we were to be blind-folded, would we pass a taste test.
Mushrooms.
Connecting on from trees, was a whole host of information garnered about mushrooms. Or rather, fungi. This could be a session of its own.
Saprophytic fungi are beneficial fungi responsible for breaking down and recycling dead plant and animal material. Food mould (penicillium) and yeast are saprophytic fungi. Shown here in the first two images is a Turkey Tail/Japanese Fan mushroom - Coriolus versicolor - used in medicine. I was just in love with the patterning. On the reverse you can see all the coral-like pores.
Ganoderma fungi are a species of fungi that create fans or brackets on dead and decaying trees. I guess this also makes them saprophytic, but I can’t find confirmation of this; they’re listed as polypore fungi. They’re another one that is highly used in medicine, but the one shown here has some other uses. It’s known as an Artist’s Bracket - ganoderma applanatum - because that lighter underside where the pores are, can be scratched (bruised) to create drawings. George also explained how this and similar mushrooms (fruiting bodies of fungi) can be used to start fires or keep embers alight (for instance, by holding an ember inside this bracket as you walk along a weary old-worldy road). It really smelled of that classic mushroom smell, and was pleasing to hold with all of its textures.
We were also pointed to a beech tree where a massive Amadou fungus - Fomes fomentarius - was living; it’s also known as Tinderhoof for how it has the appearance of a horse’s hoof (?) but can be used to start fires. It is also now again used as “mushroom leather” for how spongey and chamois it feels. Sources suggest that this is a parasitic mushroom (a fungus that thrives by latching on to other organisms and taking nutrients from them) but will transform to saprophytic once the tree starts decaying. So perhaps in this respect, taking the amadou for leather is somewhat sustainable? From the limited information available on mushroom leather R&D, they simply take the mycelium and grow the leather in the lab however, yet maybe on a small scale, foraging this inedible parasitic mushroom could be ok?
Everyday plants.
Even if foraging isn’t used practically in your own life, to supplement meals or add something “exotic”, it can be simply used as a method of reconnection. Though George had pointed out plants I knew, there is of course so much history and use to uncover. And by being in a situation where I gave myself the time to just look around, and being with folk with experience to ask questions of, I came across plants I hadn’t before.
Burdock. I was never a fan of dandelion and burdock drink, but it is a distinctive flavour. Dandelion is so recognisable, but burdock I’ve never seen before - or at least seen and known what it was. I grew up thinking the dock - that you use to ease stinging nettle stings - was the dock in this drink.
Snowdrop. Apparently this is simply a bigger version, so it threw me off, but potentially because the appearance of snowdrops is so fleeting, I have never stopped to recognise all of its parts.
Japanese knotweed. We have some of this in the Castle garden, but again, I hadn’t given myself over to paying attention. According to George, it is edible, but if you pick and then drop even the smallest fragment of the stem, it will root. It is a non-native/invasive plant that is pretty destructive as it easily sprouts in brickwork and pipes. What George wanted us to know at the very beginning of this walk is that he had special permission from the Abney Park Friends group to lead the tour and forage, including harvesting roots. Normally, this isn’t allowed, as you could be disrupting ecosystems.
Cleavers. Otherwise known as “sticky weed”, and a plant with so many uses. It can be used as a cold infusion in summer to reap its herbal benefits, or squished to create a poultice for stings and burns (though not as effective as ribwort plantain). George expended the fascinating history of the name “Mother’s Milk”; back in the day, cleavers was used to purify milk.
Finishing up in Abney Park, we pootled through some back streets and through Clissold Park, potentially my favourite park in the whole of London for its myriad of features. Again there were stories of fungi, of hawthorn berries (haws), of the weeds we pass by without a second glance. In just a couple of hours you can be placed in a bubble of focus and magic if you allow yourself to escape the comfort of packaged goods.
Find Flavour Fred:
Website: www.flavourfred.com