Yes, you can forage in the city

Helen Lehndorf is the author of A Forager’s Life: Finding my heart and home in nature (HarperCollins, RRP $39.99), a memoir weaving recipes, principles and practices from her lifelong love of discovering wild foods.

How did you get into foraging?

I grew up in a small semi-rural, coastal Taranaki town, Waitara, in the 1970s, where gathering, hunting, fishing and growing food was part of the fabric of our life so I didn’t so much get into it as grow up with it... except we didn’t call it ‘‘foraging’’ then. My father taught me about the natural world and my mother taught me kitchen skills... but they mainly taught me by doing these things and my brother and I were just expected to muck in ... often the best way to learn. I discovered the word ‘‘foraging’’ when I left home, got interested in folk herbalism and began reading books about wild food.

What do you hope people will take away from your story?

My hope is that it ignites curiosity about the wild foods and medicinals growing all around us ... and also seeds the idea that the way to a resilient future is living in radical reciprocity ... with the plants and with each other. The most enjoyable part about the writing process was that I came to see how much my formative years had informed everything that came afterwards. When I was younger, I was trying to detach from my roots so this book ended up being a kind of reconciliation of selves. The activist Eva Rickard said ‘‘somewhere in my past, is my destiny’’. Yes. It was like that.

You teach creative writing – what is your best tip for emerging writers?

Read, read, read. Read widely and hungrily. The poorest beginnerwriting is by people who don’t read. It’s like starting to play music and thinking you don’t need to learn any of the notes.

What’s a foraging tip that might surprise? Can you forage if you live in the city?

Absolutely you can! Most of my foraging has been urban foraging. There’s wild food and medicinals all around us. You don’t have to wander far. A tip that might surprise readers is that dock (Rumex), which is viewed as a terrible weed, is in the same family as buckwheat. The tall seed heads, which go brown in autumn can be harvested for the seed. The seed can be added to homemade crackers, or can be ground into flour. And if I can sneak in one more, if you’re out for a walk and see a fennel plant; chew on some of the fennel seeds. They are a great natural breath freshener.