Gather Ye Wild Things

Gathering wild things can become a year-round preoccupation, a way of life. The landscape changes shape when you start noticing which plants grow where, which plants are good for what. Good-for-nothing back lots turn into fruitful havens. Weeds in the garden look as good as the vegetables. Forest underbrush begins to tell a story as intricate as an illuminated manuscript, once one takes the time to read it.

Plants can tell the story of how life was for eons, before mass-processed food and synthetic pharmaceuticals turned our attention from the land. Most Indian vocabularies included hundreds of words for plants, their parts, their growing phases, and their uses. Native Americans had reason to make those discriminations: their health and livelihood depended on awareness of the plants that grew around them. Nowadays not so many people distinguish shapes among the green.

Plants can tell the story of how life might become tomorrow, if energy resources dwindle and supermarkets shut down. Someday we may no longer be able to count on the massive network of trucks, tractors, trains, processing centers, and monster machinery that stocks food and drugstore shelves. We are already turning to neighborhood farms and backyard gardens: sowing seeds, pulling weeds.

I guess that some people think weeds get in the way. Others ignore them. Parents often tell children that this or that is poison, don’t eat it, out of ignorance, not knowledge. Poisonous plants do grow all around us. Some could kill. But distinguishable from those few grow hundreds of plants, benign and helpful, which humankind has gathered and put to use for ages.

Some people seem devoted not just to ignoring this bounty but to destroying it as well. I stepped into the hardware store the other day and browsed through the herbicides, just out of curiosity. Here’s a partial list, copied from two cans on the shelf, of plants guaranteed dead, thanks to the contents therein: birch, blackberry, box elder, brambles, chickweed, chicory, clover, dandelion, dock, elderberry, honeysuckle, heal-all, henbit, knotweed, lamb’s quarters, mallow, mustard, oxalis, pigweed, plantain, purslane, sassafras, sheep sorrel, sumac, wild carrot, wild garlic, wild grape, wild onion, wild plum, wild radish, wild rose, wood sorrel, yarrow.

Man-made poisons have complicated the practice of gathering wild things. Herbicides, pesticides, and auto exhaust fumes damage us by damaging the soil that supports our green surroundings. If we eat plants, wild greens, or cultivated vegetables grown within their range, we might be poisoning ourselves.

Plants in cities and along automotive thoroughfares breathe deeply of lead. Their lead content decreases logarithmically with their distance from the road, and beyond 100 feet the concentration returns to safe levels. Lead appears to coat leaves more than it seeps into roots. City greens always need washing, then steaming on a rack over boiling water, which will absorb most of the remaining lead. Outside cities, railroad and power line right-of-ways often reek of poisons too. But some produce lush greenery and fruit nonetheless, a sign of nature’s unceasing fecundity. We should avoid gathering in places where we have spewed our fumes. I like instead to picture a time when berries bloom clean again.

I have a plan. We can stop poisoning and start gathering the weeds. Our bodies and our earth will live more healthfully, and we’ll still keep weeds from taking over.

We gain so much from gathering wild things. Little research has pursued the nutritional value of wild plants. The few studies that exist, though, consistently prove that wild greens, particularly common weeds like dandelion, lamb’s quarters, purslane, and amaranth, offer higher amounts of most vitamins and minerals than any garden vegetable gives. The wild world provides.

Wild plants have received some medical attention. Poke, may apple, and periwinkle are proving to contribute to the treatment of cancer. The cures require laboratory-extracted dosages, however; they are not home remedies. Scientific journals mention most herbal cures, if they mention them at all, as curious folk traditions. But herbs have helped soothe my stomach; I feel sassafras gives me a charge. But I can’t explain why, nor have I found anyone else trying to explain it.

No one needs a scientific background to gather chicory or dandelions. Conveniently, many of the most useful plants also grow most commonly. They break through cracks in city sidewalks. I’ve seen lamb’s quarters, purslane, mullein, amaranth, sheep sorrel and wood sorrel, chicory, and dandelion in downtowns East and West. My book, Gather Ye Wild Things, reflects the turn of seasons with 52 chapters, one for each week of the gathering year here in Virginia, where I live. Four of these essays, on wild foods common to the South, are condensed here.

 

Lamb’s Quarters

 

Lamb’s quarters is one of those wild plants whose virtues have been lost in tradition. Somewhere along the way it picked up the common name pigweed — a term 1 try to avoid, since people use it for several unrelated weeds. Apparently lamb’s quarters gained a reputation some time back as a plant fit for fodder: for hogs but not for humans. The word “pigweed” came into use in the mid-1800s, as the railroads cut through to the West. It seems that white settlers used the term for many plants that nourished the tribes they were displacing. The plants survived, but continue to suffer a misnomer. Let’s bring all the plants called pigweed — lamb’s quarters, purslane, wild amaranth, probably some others — back into the human fold.

The nutritional facts on these so-called pigweeds are compelling. Lamb’s quarters is a good example. An adult needs about 5,000 international units (IUs) of vitamin A daily. A half cup of lamb’s quarters offers 14,000 to 16,000 IUs, depending on the season. We need about 70 milligrams of vitamin C each day. Lamb’s quarters, again half a cup, gives 66 to 130 milligrams of vitamin C. Over the summer, the vitamin A content of lamb’s quarters increases while the vitamin C content goes down. Lamb’s quarters offers significant plant protein, supplies over one-third the adult daily requirement for calcium (about 309 milligrams in half a cup), and provides one of the highest fiber contents of any vegetable, wild or cultivated. And it tastes good too.

Lamb’s quarters grows profusely throughout the continent of North America, in city lots and country fields alike, preferring scrubby spaces, compost piles, and garden corners to the wide-open places. Once you know its shield-shaped leaf, passing through variations with the seasons, you will see it everywhere.

Lamb’s quarters grows to three, four, even five feet tall when we let it. Secondary stalks branch out from a thick ribbed spine. The leaves are jagged diamonds, dark green with a frosty sheen that intensifies in toward each budding center. As summer proceeds, lamb’s quarters’ leaves dwindle and seeds develop. The leaves respond visibly to difficult conditions, mottling red and yellow and blue when the air gets too cold or the soil too spent. But under most conditions lamb’s quarters grows full and healthy all summer long. Its leaves have substance, like spinach or kale, their color the bluest of the weedy greens.

Lamb’s quarters can get woody as summer moves on. A good rule of thumb is, if you can break it off easily you can chew it easily too. Gather just the tender tips as the plant grows large. The bunching green flowers concentrate its high food value. So do the star-shaped seeds, which can be harvested for winter cooking. Chop down a whole plant once the seeds have formed. Hang it upside down in a cool dry place. Spread newspapers under it to catch falling seeds or enclose each plant in a paper bag. When the plant is dry enough so that a leaf will crackle, shake the seeds onto papers or into a bag. Some chaff will remain. You can separate it in the wind, before a fan or hair blower, or in small quantities just by gently puffing. Or you can tolerate the chaff — it’s just dried lamb’s quarters. Sprinkle gathered seeds over omelets or casseroles for a protein-rich garnish.

I use lamb’s quarters all summer long to add green to a meal, whether cooked or in a salad. I stir-fry onions, garlic, and lamb’s quarters into an omelet for breakfast, a meal that reminds me of a morning several years ago, when a friend stirred green leaves into our eggs and I wondered, weeds for breakfast? Now I eat lamb’s quarters many a morning: how my life has changed. I also add lamb’s quarters sprigs to many summer salads.

Neither the taste, the texture, nor the nutritional riches of lamb’s quarters warrant the condescension registered in the name “pigweed.” Some people still pull up these weeds and feed them to the pigs. They raise healthy animals, to be sure. But others, with human friends and family to feed, are beginning to discover what pigs have known for quite a while: lamb’s quarters is a valuable weed.

 

Cattails

 

No one has trouble recognizing cattails. That long, tall shape, which we’ve seen in landscape paintings and autumnal bouquets since childhood, is so familiar, we hardly notice stands of cattails lining our highways. Cattails just belong there. Each year they undertake a primitive yet intricate cycle of growth and flowering that culminates in the conventional image of a brown velvet cob. But native dwellers of six continents — North Americans 300 years ago and Australian aborigines today — have noticed in detail the cycles of the cattail, for they have found abundant uses for many of its growing parts.

As each new part of the cattail plant emerges, green and tender, it is edible. Root buds in winter, young green shoots in spring, green flowers in spring and early summer. Even the bright yellow pollen as it seeks to leave its source can be collected at just the right moment and used or stored for later, a bright yellow addition to any grainy dish. You can consider that the cattails, most common among them Typha latifolia, are safe for the trying. Not all may be palatable at every phase of growth, but many are good, and none will harm you.

Cattail shoots have received the most acclaim as “Cossack asparagus,” named for peasant soldiers from the Ukraine who foraged for the blanched inner shoots of spring cattails, rarely finding them as tasty as those that grew along the banks of their home river, the Don.

Cattail roots and cattail pollen, the origin and the outpouring of this useful plant, call for entirely different methods of gathering and use. Cattail roots can be gathered all winter long, while for cattail pollen one must catch the moment in late spring or early summer when bright gold dust begins to scatter. Cattail roots require long and intricate preparation, but one uses cattail pollen as is.

Cattail roots branch, creep, and thread their way down into the mud of marshes, swamps, and streams. They will achieve a diameter of up to two inches, and with their firm, white flesh they invite experimentation. Native Americans found them to be a source for a sweet, substantial gruel. The easiest way to obtain cattail root starch, which improves the taste and texture of any baked bread, is to filter the starch through water. Gather about five six- to eight-inch lengths of cattail root for each cup of flour in a favorite bread recipe. Prepare the roots as follows.

Scrub the dirt off the outside of the roots. Into a clean pot or bowl filled with water, break or slice open each root lengthwise. You can feel coagulant clusters of starch and the long fibers running lengthwise through the root. Work with the roots, trying to dislodge and dissolve the starch into the water. The fibers will stay strung to the root skin. Put the bowl of starchy water aside, and in half an hour the starch will settle. Pour off the water, add more, and work with the roots once again. You can feel the starchy results of your labor. Go at it as long as you sense more starch yet to dissolve.

The remaining thick white paste, something like cornstarch mixed with water, I add to cornbread, biscuits, waffles. You will taste and feel the difference. The cattail starch lends a smooth, glutinous consistency to them.

Winter is the best time to gather cattail roots, either for the starch or for the tasty buds of next year’s stalks, edible raw or cooked. But late spring or early summer is the best time to keep watch for cattail pollen, produced by the male half of the spikey cattail flower. Take a look at the cattail inflorescence or flowering process. Often we envision the cattail as a static image, a cigar on a stick. But those flowering parts grow and change through spring and summer. First a papery sheath encloses two distinct parts, the male spike above and the green female cob, potential seedbed, beneath. Sunshine stimulates a bursting out from the male flower: bright yellow pollen parts at a touch. Those particles that escape your reach will settle on waiting female flowers, the lower half of the process, triggering reformation into a tightly packed cluster of winged seeds — that cylindrical formation we commonly envision as a cattail.

You won’t stop the process if you draw off a little pollen. Plenty will escape you. Carry a quart jar into which you can bend and tap the shedding stalks. Substitute cattail pollen for some part of the flour in any recipe for baking.

As you learn to use cattails, remember the millions of others on all six continents who have gathered this benign and generous plant — not only for food, but also to make building foundations, shoes, spears, walls, partitions, ropes, mats, sieves and baskets, quilts, cushions, diapers, shrouds, sleeping bags, life preservers, sound and heat insulation. Native healers found cattail flowers an external remedy for burns, wounds, and ulcers; found a tea of the leaves helpful against uterine or rectal hemorrhaging; and found the roots useful for women and animals in labor, to promote contractions and expel the placenta. A folk cure for diarrhea uses cattail rootstock, boiled in milk. It is sweet, bland, and nutritious.

 

Puffballs

 

Sometimes a child will find, in field or forest, a little white globe. She picks it up, pinches it, poof! A gentle spray of mouse-brown dust. Puffball spores disperse like smoke or fairy glitter.

But to the autumn forager puffball spores mean edible mushrooms discovered too late for the eating. For when puffballs poof, they have already passed through their cycle of fruition. They send out spores, like seeds, for the new year’s crop. Arrive a week or a month earlier, and you will be able to gather puffballs. From spring through autumn, whenever moisture conditions are right, puffballs appear. Along with morels, they are the most positively identifiable edible mushrooms around.

Puffballs pop up bright white, in rich cleared pastureland or on the rotting limbs of fallen trees. Orson K. Miller’s excellent guidebook, Mushrooms of North America (Dutton, 1978), names 16 species. All form round white globes with hardly a stem to stand on. They feel soft and spongy, like any other mushroom. Some species fruit no larger than an apricot, while others grow as large as a melon. Age turns them brown and warty. Then a hole cracks open on top, through which the spores scatter. Mycelium (a fungus’s underground root system) may remain where you find a spent puffball. Come back next summer or next autumn.

Of those 16 species, it’s easy to separate the good puffballs from the four varieties that might be bitter to the palate. If a puffball is white through and through, smells good, and is big enough to bother with, you can gather it to eat. One must also always check to find the flesh uniform and patternless. Be sure you do not see the embryo of mushroom stem or gills. If you do, you may be gathering Amanita buttons and they may be deadly. Careful observation should guide you as you gather and prepare puffballs. Slice each puffball at least once down the middle to verify white uniformity. You can peel off the outer skin if it feels tough.

Puffballs can be sauteed or deep fried, or dipped in a tempura batter. For simplicity’s sake, I prefer a Wild Puffball Fry. Fill a small paper bag with one cup of flour (half white, half whole wheat) and half a teaspoon of salt. Pinch in some dried herb, if you want seasoning. Toss in manageable slices of fresh white puffball. Shake gently to coat three to four of them. Melt three to four tablespoons of butter in a skillet and fry the fungus until golden brown. Puffballs taste sweet, nutty, earthy.

North American natives gathered puffballs for eating; so did settlers traveling west. And from several tribes explorers learned that dry spores, the smoky dust of puffballs, have hemostatic properties. Indians used the dust to treat bleeding cuts and wounds, and may even have gathered it in autumn to store through the winter for treatment when needed.

 

Kudzu

 

If you live in the South, you already know about kudzu. Aggressive vines creep from fields and embankments up fences, walls, and trees. Its benign-looking trefoil and fruity flowers smother the Southern summer landscape. Frost may shrivel its leaves, but an enormous underground root stores up enough energy to boost spring growth to an amazing rate of one foot per day.

Kudzu’s prolific growth pattern at first won it admiration and a place on this continent. Originally imported from the Orient, it was prized as an ornamental oddity grown to shade the backyard veranda. By the 1920s and ’30s Southern farmers were raising kudzu for other reasons. Farm animals devoured it, and from it they gained important nutrients. It grew in the poorest of soil, filling in gullies and eroded farmland, replenishing nitrogen to spent acreage. It took hold anywhere and seemed to help roadside and railway embankments, where no other plants would keep the dirt from sliding. Government agents and private enthusiasts set in new kudzu plants by the acre.

But over the last 20 years kudzu has lost favor with the American farmers who once praised it as a wonder plant. Kudzu has become a pest. Hard to control and difficult to eradicate, it weighs down buildings and kills the trees that support it. Thousands of dollars are now spent annually trying to wipe it out. But kudzu has a number of uses, well known in its native lands.

The plant was imported from Japan, where it grows with less abandon and where tradition appreciates it. Oriental cuisine includes kudzu — not only the leaves and flowers but also, more commonly, the starch extracted from its sizable roots. The root provides useful nutrients and has medicinal virtues as well. But no one imported Oriental recipes for kudzu when they imported the plant itself.

Recently an entire book has been published to sing the praises of kudzu. William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi’s The Book of Kudzu (Autumn Press, 1977) shares with Westerners many Eastern uses for kudzu. The authors foresee a time when “the South may come to be viewed as a treasure-trove bursting with ‘white gold’ just waiting to be harvested.”

Kudzu is most noticeable in midsummer when, amidst its profusion of wide leaves, dangle clusters of fuchsia flowers, shaped something like sweet peas. The flowers smell like ripe grapes, and their taste combines the flavors of flower, fruit, and vegetable. Kudzu flowers, shoots, and tender new leaves are all edible, raw or cooked. Once the plant has flowered, most of its leaves become too tough to eat, even after lengthy steaming. But mark the spot; because once flowers and foliage die, kudzu roots attain their prime.

Kudzu starch is prepared by a method quite similar to the process used to extract starch from the cattail root, described above. The kudzu root is woodier, though, and fingertips do not so easily dislodge its starches. Dig up a gallon container full of kudzu roots, rinse and scrub them, then get ready for lengthy processing. Occasional attention over several days will provide you with healthful kudzu starch.

Starting with scrubbed medium-size roots (up to an inch and a half across), slice coin-shaped chunks. If you have a blender, fill it halfway with water and add the kudzu chunks a few at a time. Whiz them in the blender, and froth will rise as if you were whipping cream. If you have a food mill or meat grinder, put smaller chunks of root through or just dice the roots fine and toss them into clean water.

The extracting process, which runs over several days, requires that you add water, strain the fiber through a fine cloth, wring the cloth-caught fiber for any remaining starch, then add water to the fiber all over again. Let the starchy liquid sit in a cool place for at least two days. As with the cattail, the starch will sink to the bottom. Pour or ladle off the water, then dilute the starch with clean water once again and let it sit another day or two in the cold. Don’t let it freeze. Ultimately you will produce a chunky white starch, tending toward dull brown, settling to the bottom. You can use the wet starch in soups, breads, or stews, or you can dry it on a baking sheet, in the air, or in a very slow oven, so that you can store it as dried powder.

Shurtleff and Aoyagi offer many traditional recipes for sauces, soups, desserts, and noodles using kudzu powder. While their recipes assume that you will buy packaged kudzu powder, we may as well gather and prepare our own.

Kudzu powder seems to offer medicinal qualities as well as good taste and texture in food. Its virtues must come from its extreme alkalinity. Oriental tradition prescribes kudzu root tea for stomach troubles: it soothes acid indigestion. For the tea, gather, dice, and dry the roots on a windowsill or in a very slow oven. Simmer them (perhaps with other healing roots like wild ginger or ginseng) for up to an hour, so they slowly release their powers into the water.

If more of us actually pulled up surrounding kudzu, the Southeastern landscape might be freed of its burden. Considering the abuse this plant has recently suffered, it could use our help. Many public embankments, once deliberately planted in kudzu, are now deliberately sprayed with herbicides, year after year, to kill the kudzu. Avoid those patches of kudzu which have soaked up either herbicides or engine exhaust fumes — poisons and leads that can do harm. Seek out the more secluded strands of kudzu, creeping into woods and fields and backyards unhindered. Spraying kudzu is just covering one mistake with another. We end up the worse for it, our land ravaged, nothing growing once again. Pulling up kudzu is facing the situation. Gathering kudzu is making the most of it. □

 

WILD PLANTS

Susan Tyler Hitchcock's book excerpted on these pages is a good guide to what plant to gather when — especially for people in areas with climates similar to hers in Virginia. But it is not a field guide and doesn’t solve the problem of how to identify an unknown plant found in the wild. Some suggestions for books that will help with that are: Lee Peterson’s encyclopedic Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), May Theilgard Watts’s Flower Finder (Nature Study Guild, 1955), R.E. Wilkinson and H.E. Jaques’s How to Know the Weeds (William C. Brown, 1972), Orson K. Miller, Jr.’s Mushrooms of North America (Dutton, 1978), or the relevant parts of George A. Petrides’s Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

Clever ideas for what to do with your wild plants once you’ve found them are in Billy Joe Tatum’s Wild Foods Cookbook and Field Guide (Workman, 1976).

Native Harvests is a comprehensive guide to the foods of American Indians, and its main emphasis is on the preparation of the wild foods native to our land. Written by Barrie Kavasch for the American Indian Archaelogical Institute, it is published by Vintage Books.

Finally, not to be overlooked are the Euell Gibbons classics: Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, Stalking the Good Life, all published by David McKay.