Pick a piece of Chelsea:
Foraging is all the rage in the gourmet veg garden. Helen Billiald looks at how to create your own wild foraging patch, Chelsea style
Foraging for supper is all the rage in the gourmet vegetable garden
Gardeners looking for a more relaxed way to grow fruit and veg should look no further than the foraging patch. Merging your edibles with a naturalistic plant palette could be right up your street. At this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, designer Paul Hervey-Brookes has created an artisan garden that takes inspiration from foraging and the Nordic way of life. You might not have space to follow his lead and add a sauna or plunge pool to your plot (alas!), but anyone can incorporate a semi-wild style of planting, using herbs and other wild edibles to add a natural element to your plate.
Before spinach and rainbow chard, a bevy of wild greens commonly found their way onto people’s tables. You might not want to cultivate the annual weed fat hen (Chenopodium album) or the overly energetic ransoms (wild garlic) but other, better-behaved options are out there. Sorrel, with its particular lemony bite is an invaluable spring leaf, while marsh samphire and sea kale are two British natives that you can cultivate at home and any cook will delight in. Plenty of herbs have tiptoed their way into our borders already thanks to their sheer charisma. The domed green umbels of angelica are worth making room for even if you have no intention of candying its stems, while pretty white daisy-like f lowers of chamomile will brighten a sunny situation as well as offering a calming tea. Berries are perhaps our strongest association with foraging. Who hasn’t enjoyed picking wild blackberries? For something a little more garden-friendly, bilberries are low-growing shrubs related to cultivated blueberries that can be found growing wild across heathlands in the UK. They need an acid soil but you can cheat by planting them in ericaceous compost in pots. If you’re happy to look further afield for inspiration, there are dozens of ‘wild’ fruits worth making room for. Honeyberry (Lonicera caerulea) isn’t fussy about soil type and the shrub produces lots of blueberrylike fruit. The Chilean guava likes a little more warmth but it rewards with pretty pink scented flowers followed by red, blueberry-shaped fruits with a wildstrawberry flavour. With a little more space you could step up to the Japanese wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) with sweet red berries on arching two-year-old canes. Grow them like tall vigorous raspberries, cutting out fruited stems and tying in new ones. Finally, what about the autumn olive, Elaeagnus umbellata, a large shrub with olive-like foliage? Its bright red fruit must be left on the tree to fully ripen, then it will develop sweetness alongside its sharper edge.
“Pretty white daisy-like flowers of chamomile will brighten a sunny situation as well as offering a calming tea”