A walk in the woods

Edible greens, avoiding hemlock (again) and pickling magnolia

An early spring morning in full sunshine, though with my feet tucked into my trusty warm socks and wellies, as the path we’ll walk this morning runs around the back part of the lake. It’s still boggy in places and with neither of the perils of slipping down a hemlock-covered bank into the filth nor sliding off the old stone bridge into the sludge, being particularly high on my agenda, I took a stout stick from the hedge and wandered off into the woods with Jamie. This man knows everything there is about what you can and most definitely cannot eat that grows wild on the forest floor. A walking encyclopedia of mushrooms and foraging, happy to recite to you in Latin the names of almost everything we see. What many of you might not realise is that it’s probably not the shrooms that’ll kill you, it’s the plants. It seems that wherever you walk in woodland there is any number of plants underfoot that even in the tiniest quantities would most likely have you hooked up to a dialysis machine for the remainder of what would be a very shortened life. The woodland wants to trick us with vibrant green-looking plants and try to kill us it seems.

I wanted a basket of magnolia flowers, blushed pink, tightly closed with their intriguing ginger flavour, so I could pickle them in the persimmon vinegar I made last year. I have a few litres spare so a couple of jars of blushed preserved petals would be a welcome addition to the larder. Magnolia in all its varieties thwarted me today, as in West London my tree is full of pink flowers, but here in the countryside they are only just about opening, and the two trees I checked weren’t in the best condition as yet. I picked about twenty heads and put them away for later in the day.

Today’s forage