Common Wood Sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) is often listed as being toxic in wild flower identification books, but it is recommended by many foragers. There are some potential health and toxicity issues to be aware of (see below), but in small quantities it is quite a good edible wild plant with a refreshing/tangy flavour.
Allium ursinum- Wild Garlic, or the name I much prefer, Ramsons. This plant is probably one of the most commonly experienced plants in the British countryside, not necessarily by taste, but by smell. From January onwards you will find the young shoots pushing their way up through the leaf litter of broadleaved woodlands and by March it is hard to move in these areas without catching it's disctinctive scent. The following is a very simple sauce suitable for dipping or using as a drizzle or dressing, it is tangy at first taste with the garlic flavour kicking in after a couple of seconds. This recipe came about as a dipping sauce for periwinkles.
Something that we always talk about on our foraging courses is the law. This isn’t in a general “don’t do naughty things or the police will throw you in jail”, but a well researched overview of the various laws which apply when you are out collecting plants and funghi. Aside from the well-known factor of protected species, we talk about the less well known protected areas of land, which can even prohibit the landowner from digging a hole on their own patch without the correct permissions...
This distinctive fungi looks like something straight out of Lord of the Rings (or your other chosen fantasy film). You have probably seen this small fungus adding some colour to the otherwise often dull winter palette as it pushes it’s way through moss and leaf litter in order to blow it’s spores across the woodland. Don’t be put off by the red colour warning, as it is in fact considered edible.
This short, green and slightly hairy plant is almost always found in shaded wet soils within a few metres of a body of water – even if that body of water is more of a swamp than a babbling brook. It can be found across the UK and all year round, although it is most noticeable from early Spring until August-September.
In this blog post I will do my best to explain it, pick out the relevant parts of the legislation and steer a forager, bushcrafter or ethnobotanist in what is (hopefully) the right direction.
At the bottom of this blog post is the shortened explanation (a tl;dr), but for those who want to know exactly where that came from here are some blocks of legal text:
Back in November 2018 I spent a couple of days working on two articles for VICE - one was taking renowned sandwich chef Max Halley foraging for edibles on a North Wales beach, and for the other I wandered around a damp forest with writer Angela Hui and photographer Elijah Thomas. Each piece was part of a wider project promoting the idea of 'microgapping' in the UK.
Extreme Low Tide foraging is becoming popular and one of the increasingly common requests we get for a private coastal foraging course over here in North Wales. It’s easy to understand why – when all of the most interesting and edible parts of the beach are under the water for part of every day then there’s a lot more to see when the water has retreated to its lowest point.
The UK is home to one of the biggest tidal ranges in the world – the Severn Estuary can have a difference of as much as 15m (49ft). The tidal range of one particular spot can be dependent on several factors, ranging from the shape of the bay, inlet or estuary where the range is being measured to the underwater geology and topography, and even the direction it is facing relative to the prevailing winds.