Books sometimes aren’t only references books, they’re storehouses of memory. Skimming through my shelves the other day, I pulled out this one with a brimming heart – it was really THE reference book for when I moved to the UK, years ago, with kid in tow, two backpacks and a lover waiting for me with warm heart and open arms.
It wasn’t so easy, moving across the other side of the world. I was in an environment full of valleys and hills and dark forests, so different to the wide open spaces of Australia and I’d run to Glastonbury Tor just to get that huge vista of land that I was homesick more. I missed the warble of magpies and the honeyed light, missed the medicinal scent of hot gums and crackle of dry forest underfoot. I missed the wild ocean. Yet I was happy to be there, in the land of my ancestors, ending up six miles from where my Granddad was born in the 1920’s, so many years ago – a fact unknown to me until Mum mentioned it as I drove past that village often!
Ground Elder was a Great Spinach Substitute
It was the wildness of this landscape that Jamie introduced me to, knife at his belt and the forest glinting green in his hazel eyes.
I’d follow this new man through wet woods and we’d return arms laden with bounty: sloes and blackberries, ramsons and silverweed, oak leaves and oak bark, crabapples and mushrooms. There was a richness to the woods there that was quite unlike the forests of home, and it wasn’t long before I was deeply, deeply in love, communing with the wild spirits in the trees and caressed by the coolness of glade and warmth of hill tops, the trickle of clear streams and scratch of bramble.
We probably drank far too much elderflower champagne at our wedding
Moving to a tiny village in Dorset, we made country wines galore. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to ride a bike a mile up a dark lane after a demijohn of elderberry and blackberry, I tell you.
Those hedges have a way of embracing you and be damned if that bike just wouldn’t stay upright. Sloe gin was a Christmas special. Rosehip and gooseberry wine were crisp and heady, and hawthorn felt like you were infusing the spirit of the Green Man (how do you make a haw wine? – sorry, awful joke). We had so much of the stuff it filled our cupboards and I tell you what, you do NOT want a huge demijohn of blackberry wine exploding in your clothes cupboard. We'd brew nettle beer and infuse it with berries too. What heady days those were!
I soon forgot the land down under and felt I was wedded to this place, as if by infusing the wild foods that I had become intoxicated with the landscape, drunk with its beauty and abundance.
I do miss those days. I'd give anything for a taste of salty pickled samphire, though I was sick of it at the time. How I miss the tang of berries found in hedgerows and the ramsons blanketing spring woods, thick with heady garlic scents (a mayoinaisse with ramson seeds at the end of their season is just delightful!). But as is the way of things, I've re-attached myself to Australian forests again, though it's taken some time! We have wild foods too, but it's a different landscape, a different vibe, a different kind of abundance.
It's beautiful to travel through this book and have the memories leap up from the page at me.
What's your favourite wild food? Do you have a favourite wild food book? I highly recommend this one if you're looking - it's a real treasure. There's so many recipes in there and a lot of lore too. Do you own a copy? Have you made anything out of it?
I'm also totally honoured to be a passenger on the #ecotrain - check out this hashtag for some pretty amazing posts permaculture to meditation, environmental issues to food forests - I highly recommend checking out this tag as you're guaranteed of sweeeetness!
