the thorny canes catch an ankle
and I wince, wondering
was that there, yesterday?
and the answer is a likely no,
because everything is growing
changing
shifting
reaching for the new warmth
and bathing in the rain.
further down the trail
the shrubbery shudders
with the passage of a robin
carrying soft lichen for her nest,
and I wonder if she knows
what lichen is,
and what ancient name
she calls it by
and if I would recognize it
if she told me. I’ve been fascinated by foraging and wild edible plants since I was a little child and someone—a relative, I can’t remember which one—handed me a piece of salicornia from the beach near the family cabin and told me it was okay to eat. I took a bite, and it was salty and crisp and delicious. It tasted of the sea.
Ever since, I’ve been enthralled.
I didn't really lean into my interest until my twenties, when—living city-adjacent and craving the wild—I started collecting local foraging books, studying herbalism, and really applying myself to the identification of the plants around me. It’s been quite the journey, and it never really ends.
Early spring is the start of trail-snack-season, when the friendly faces of familiar wild edibles are reappearing all along the paths and woodland boundaries. Dandelions and violets, cleavers and clovers, dock and burdock, sheep sorrel and dead nettles, yarrow and chickweed…later on we will be munching on summer blooms and berries, but for now it’s the fresh wild greens that our bodies crave and need after the stagnation of winter.
I’ve been at this study for several years, and these days I only occasionally bump up against a plant I don’t recognize. But I still remember a time when walking the woods felt like wandering in a house full of strangers.
It’s called the green blur, in foraging vernacular. Someone new to identifying wild plants may look at the landscape around them and see only a wash of color, nothing familiar, just green. In that mode, it can be difficult to “see” properly. It’s just like being faced with a crowd of thousands of people. Your brain can’t process each individual face, so it just turns it into one mass. A tangle.
But something magical happens when you learn the name and “face” of even one common wild plant. Just one. Suddenly, it’s not a stranger. It might not even be a friend, yet, but it’s at least an acquaintance. This changes the way you walk, the way you look at a patch of green. The more you learn, the more friends you start to see in surprising places.
Foraging has taught me that a thing is only scary, daunting, or overwhelming until we learn its name. The things we fear, the things we don’t understand…sometimes it’s only because we don’t know what to call them. We haven’t allowed ourselves to learn their nature, to get acquainted, to find out why they are the way they are.
There’s history and folklore in plant names. Science, too, and subtle humor. And the more we work with each plant—cooking and eating it, making medicine with it, watching how it sprouts, grows, and dies—the more deeply attuned to the seasonality within ourselves we become, and the more the delicate threads Creator-God weaves between each life become visible.
We start to see friendly faces all around us. Even in places where we never did, before.
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Gah! “…what ancient name she calls it by” is gorgeous writing.
When I first moved to the mountains nearly six years ago I was very guilty of the green blur. Since then, thankfully, I've learned the names of a few of the plants I encounter on my trail runs up the hills and you're right, being able to name them makes them more familiar, more friend than stranger. Thank you for this thoughtful post.