Smells like victory
As a Londoner with more time spent underground than with the city’s flora, my knowledge of foraging is embarrassingly poor.
However, moving from London to Wales – which has nearly three times more common land than England – was the perfect excuse to improve my botanical skills.
Through some research, I found that wild garlic is common across the UK and is a good entry-level plant to forage – it can be eaten raw and is relatively simple to find.
I used a variety of apps including PlantNet to help find the wild garlic in Cardiff’s Bute Park without eating the similarly looking, but poisonous, lily of the valley. After an hour or so of searching, I found a cluster of wild garlic leaves sprouting from the ground.
The PlantNet app asks you to take a picture of a plant to identify it. Once snapped, the app provides a list of plants in order of visual similarity, complete with images to cross-reference with your own.
I took a picture and was greeted with an 85% match for wild garlic. However, I did not feel confident enough to rely on imagery alone to stop an untimely death-by-nature.
Wild Food UK’s hedgerow guide provided an encyclopaedic knowledge of British flora, including information on whether something is edible or poisonous. You can search for a plant by either inputting its name or characteristics.
Entries also have a “possible confusion” section, in which I learnt about lily of the valley. The section clearly explains that wild garlic’s stems have one leaf, compared to lily of the valley’s two.
Plus, the dead giveaway is the smell: wild garlic stinks of garlic.
After a quick whiff, I tore a handful of leaves and put them in my mesh pouch.
Most of my foraging time was spent searching for wild garlic, as well as photographing anything that looked remotely edible with PlantNet.
It made a refreshing change to traipsing through the park to force some fresh air into my lungs; having a task to complete made me feel connected with nature, and although my forage was small, it felt wildly mighty.
For more info on foraging (plus a quick, easy recipe for wild garlic and mushroom risotto), check out our latest issue of GORP.