A happy-looking group of people is gathered around a camping stove in a park in suburban south Manchester, enjoying the garlicky aromas coming from a frying pan full of St George’s mushrooms and spring greens, flavoured with three-cornered leek. This is the treat at the end of a three-hour wild food walk led by forager and medical herbalist Jesper Launder.
Didsbury’s Fletcher Moss park and the land beyond is one of Launder’s regular stomping grounds. He learned about foraging after his parents bought a dilapidated cottage in rural France. They spent a decade’s worth of holidays doing it up, which gave the young Jesper ample time to explore the countryside, fascinated with the edible possibilities of French fields and hedgerows. As a result, Launder can spot food from 20 paces – a skill that our group is keen to acquire.
Many top-flight chefs have an ongoing interest in the fruits of the forage, scattering their menus with hairy bittercress and wild mushrooms, but at its simplest, foraging is picking blackberries for a pie or nettles for a soup.
Clare, one of today’s group, hit pay dirt on a wild food walk last summer when someone noticed a plum tree, a relic from a garden that had long since disappeared. “Someone looked to the right and there was this mass of plums,” she says. “It was like a cartoon, when someone shakes the tree and they all fall down.
“Free food is so fantastic. I walk the dog, see something and stop. The dog’s not keen because not much walking happens. It’s more standing and picking.”
During the group’s time with Launder, we learn an incredible amount, including how to forage safely, sustainably and within the law. It turns out that the tender stems of Japanese knotweed, the controversial invasive weed that’s hard to eradicate, have a sharp, vivid rhubarby flavour that beg to be sweetened and stewed.
The flowering tops of oilseed rape, which have blown on to the banks of the river Mersey, can be eaten raw or treated like purple sprouting broccoli. We reach up into pine trees and eat the knobbly, tender catkins that will, a few weeks later, produce clouds of yellow pine pollen.
There are more salad-ready greens than we can shake a stick at, lots of different alliums, including juicy three-cornered leek, sweet cicely and plenty of goosegrass, which Launder wrings in his hands until it produces rivulets of dark green juice – apparently the ideal spring tonic. We also find rings of St George’s mushrooms in the forest, which smell like freshly milled flour.
Not all the flavours are easy to love (jack-by-the-hedge is very bitter, a shame as it’s common and easy to identify), but finding something in what looks like a patch of nothing is thrilling. It feels like a skill we can take away, too.
Mark, who has picked half a dozen goodies to take back home and cook, says: “You wander through this swath of green seeing plant, plant, plant, and after Jesper’s been with you, you’re seeing plant, plant, lunch.”
