Forever foraging

The pandemic has been an unexpected boon for Johanna Knox - it’s prompted a renewed interest in her guide to foraging, writes Bess Manson,

Since Johanna Knox was a kid, she has been fascinated with nature. Flowers, weeds, trees she found them a constant source of inspiration. Growing up in Maungaraki in Lower Hutt, she watched her father digging and nurturing the family’s huge kitchen garden and orchard.

She and her sister would often accompany their environmental activist mother to protests and meetings.

“When I was a kid I was always snipping bits of plants off and taking them inside, boiling them up,” she says.

She buried apples in the garden for winter. Her father was as surprised as anyone when he accidentally unearthed them. They were still good to eat, she recalls.

She made perfume for her friend from water and lavender, which was not a raging success, but the seed was sown for a life infused with a curiosity for foraging.

It’s hardly surprising then that Knox turned her interest in nature into a book, A Forager’s Treasury, first published in 2013.

With the book’s success, and a continued interest in foraging, her publishers asked her to update and revise it.

For an author in a world where publishing deals are hard to strike, it was a huge endorsement.

Knox, 53, is pretty pragmatic. The growing public awareness of climate change, climate-damaging events such as the Australian fires and, of course, a global pandemic, might have something to do with the popularity of foraging.

“Perhaps people were thinking they might have to become a little more self-reliant in the future. I know that’s what they were thinking. A friend of mine sent me a message saying ‘I just bought your book. Here’s hoping I don’t have to rely on it completely.’

“I know it was said jokingly, but … it’s in the back of people’s minds,” she says.

Knox, of Ngāti Tukorehe and Ngāti Kahu ki Tauranga descent, says the updated version of the book reflects her reconnection with her whakapapa. It includes new sections and advice on where to find edible plants in Aotearoa, how to harvest them, and how to use them whether it be to eat or to use as a cream, balm or dye.

She describes herself as a compulsive researcher and experimenter who loves to document it all.

“It’s kind of cool, because I think there are quite a few people out there whose foraging style is like that. I see them posting about their ideas and experiments in foraging groups on social media, and I always think, ‘yay, a kindred spirit’. ”

There’s a meditative quality to foraging, Knox says. She refers to it as “foraging mode”.

“I can feel a change, I go into a sort of reverie. I get absorbed by it. I stop thinking about people and I start listening to everything around me and seeing where it wants to lead me.”

She recommends it. We should all be doing something that is connecting us with nature, she says.

That could be foraging, gardening or getting involved in an ecological restoration project.

“We do need a greater awareness of just what the planet is and to remember we are part of this bigger thing.”

The Forager’s Treasury – the essential guide to finding and using wild plants in Aotearoa (Allen & Unwin, $45) is out now.