Far Away and Close to Home

My three boys on a recent trip to Missouri. Here they are at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. We found lots of edible plants there, but they were cultivated and labeled, so they don't really count. We did, however, find lots of edible wild plants elsewhere on our trip.

Autumn berry bushes line the driveway to our local high school.
I took this picture this past weekend; the leaves are just
coming out. The berries will be ripe in the fall.

It's amazing to me how often I have to travel far from home to identify something that is growing in abundance where I live. For example, last summer on a family hike in NH I spotted a large bush with interesting reddish-orange berries, which were about the size of a pea but more oblong. The berries were speckled with silver, as though an artist had splatter painted them. The artist must then have painted a sparkly glaze on the undersides of the leaves; they were silver, too. Fortunately, I had my favorite foraging books with me, and I spent probably 15 minutes first leafing through the books in search of a similar picture and then comparing the description of the possible match to the specimen at hand. Finally confident in my identification, I plucked a fruit and got my first taste of the pleasingly tart autumn berry.

Silvery underside of the leaves of an autumn berry bush.

Only after that first laborious identification did I realize that autumn berries are growing everywhere – at my local playground, at the high school behind my house, at a nearby Audubon sanctuary, and just about everywhere else. Apparently the federal government planted these attractive bushes alongside highways at some point, and the plants have effectively spread far and wide. The boys and I spent a pleasant afternoon picking berries at the high school last fall, and I made my first ever jelly from the juice (which I collected via my then new steam juicer, a truly marvelous invention). My two younger sons and I enjoyed the berries straight from the bush (although I'm pretty sure the youngest was enjoying the sizable seeds, too), but the flavor was too tart for my eldest son and my husband. Cooked with sugar into a jelly, though, autumn berries were an uncontested delight.

On another adventure away from home, I found my first black cherries alongside a road in the White Mountains region of NH, yet they grow at my local lake and elsewhere near my home. I first identified sumac in a front yard in Rye, NH (near the coast), but how I could have failed to notice its incredible abundance before that is beyond me (for a while after that first identification, I would scan the roadsides for sumac as we whizzed past at up to 60 miles per hour. Although my own excitement has waned, my kids still shout "Sumac!" every time they spot any from a car window – they have been a little slower to figure out that finding sumac isn't actually that difficult).

Common blue violet. The leaves are heart shaped. The flowers are
entirely purple; some just look white because I took this picture in the rain,
and the light is reflecting off the leaves.

Today I was hiking (in the rain, without kids -- two conditions I rarely encounter on a hike) and thought I saw some wood violets. When I bent down for a closer look at the leaves, I saw that they were in fact the same obnoxious "weed" I've been pulling up from my lawn and garden for years. When I got home, I checked the description of wood violet so I'll be better prepared to recognize it if I actually do see it sometime, and in the process I discovered that this plant I'd thought was a downright nuisance actually makes these pretty purple flowers (or it would, if I would just stop pulling it up) and that, furthermore, the flowers and young leaves are edible! It took a walk in the woods for me to get to know the common blue violet that grows all over my yard. The flowers and leaves are packed with vitamins A and C. One of my books mentions the intriguing possibility of making jelly from the flowers. (I haven't tasted the flowers because I didn't know what they were when I found them in the woods, and I don't think I've allowed any to bloom at my house; in any event, it's still pouring here, so I haven't had an opportunity to check.)

Honeysuckle blossoms.

The farthest I've ever traveled to identify a plant that grows near my house is Missouri. My family and I just got back from a trip to visit some friends there, and in the backyard of one set of friends a familiar scent brought back faint childhood memories of sucking out the sweet nectar of honeysuckle blossoms. I was probably about 8 the last time I did this, and I couldn't exactly remember what a honeysuckle blossom looked like. The smell, however, was unforgettable. I quickly located the flowers producing that delicious aroma and asked my friend whether the bushes were honeysuckle. She thought so, as did my husband, and so I plucked a blossom and sucked out the nectar by running my teeth along the thin tube at the base of the flower. Oh, to be the size of a bee and drink this sweet nectar in mouthfuls rather than drops!

My middle son and my friend's
four-year-old playing in the
honeysuckle bushes. They are
pretending to be bears. There is
also a grape vine growing on the left.

Back at home, the boys and I thought we discovered a honeysuckle bush growing right next to our favorite picnic rock. We've been there so many times before and yet never noticed the bush. Because spring is less advanced here in Massachusetts than in Missouri, the bush is just putting out its buds. It might not be long before we can have a second taste of that sweet honeysuckle nectar. And, if we turn out to be wrong, then I'm sure we'll spot honeysuckle somewhere close by soon -- now that we've traveled all the way to Missouri to learn what it looks like.

My friend's backyard had a number of other edible plants. There were grape vines, a peach tree (not originally wild, but I think it's fair to say it's wild now), chickweed (the common type, not the hairy mouse-ear variety that grows in our backyard), and wood sorrel. There might have even been an avocado tree: my friend reports that her four-year-old likes to throw his avocado pits into the ditch at the back of their property, and one of the plants growing there did look an awful lot like the two avocado trees I once grew from my own avocado pits (unfortunately, my poor gardening skills combined with insufficient light in our house killed the trees).

Garlic mustard in flower at my friend's house.

And, also growing in the ditch at the edge of my friend's property were some flowering plants that I thought looked familiar. I apparently took pictures of them but then completely forgot to investigate further. I came across the pictures just now as I was reviewing those I took on our trip, and I was surprised to see the same kind of plant I recently identified in the parking lot at our bank, then on our way to the picnic rock (where we found the honeysuckle), and subsequently on every roadside. It's a plant high up on the Most Wanted List: garlic mustard. Garlic mustard is

Garlic-mustard flowers in MA.

an invasive weed that, according to my sources, will out-compete just about every other plant if given the chance. One must take extreme care not to transport roots or seeds to places where it hasn't yet found a home. If you happen to like the taste of garlic mustard, then you can combine culinary pursuits with weed removal. One of my sources classified garlic mustard as a pungent green and described the taste as powerful and bitter, not for the faint of heart. I don't tend to like mustard or bitterness, so I was surprised to find that I liked the taste of the leaves (but small quantities are still recommended). Incidentally, my middle son claimed to like it as well, although I'm quite certain that this is further evidence that kids always enjoy food they've picked or prepared themselves more than food served at the table. I'd bet large sums of money that he wouldn't eat garlic mustard leaves if I served them in a salad at dinner.

We had brought along a picnic lunch, so I added a few garlic-mustard leaves to my roast-beef sandwich. The leaves vary in shape from rounded to pointed and have wavy, irregular margins. The rounded leaves at the bottom of the flowering stalks are reportedly less bitter, so I went for those (I have now experimentally compared the bottom leaves from a flowering stalk with the bottom leaves from a non-flowering stalk, and I can confirm that the former are tastier). The rapidly growing stem tips of non-flowering plants are also edible. In his book Edible Wild Plants: From Dirt to Plate, John Kallas gives a recipe for steamed garlic-mustard stem tips, but he says that cooking removes all of the garlic flavor and almost none of the bitterness, so I'm not in a hurry to try it. However, on the recommendation of Samual Thayer in Nature's Garden, I tried munching on a raw stalk. The flavor was much milder than the leaves and quite pleasant. I have high hopes for using this plant similarly to how I would use green onions, but the flavor will add a hint of garlic.

Garlic-mustard omelet garnished with two sprigs
of garlic-mustard tops.

John Kallas's recipe for a garlic-mustard omelet, on the other hand, uses the leaves and purports to retain the garlic flavor, so it seemed worth a test; I had enjoyed the leaves on my sandwich, afterall. For lunch today I mostly followed Kallas's recipe, which included red peppers, caramelized red onions, mushrooms, chopped fresh rosemary, and garlic-mustard leaves. I also added a little crumbled bacon and a sprinkling of asiago cheese. The result was delicious and was even a hit with my two youngest sons (the eldest elected to have yogurt, although he did try a bite of the omelet and said it was good).

 That's one more plant I first discovered far away and now can't stop finding close to home. I wonder what delicious treats I'll find the next time I travel!

The roots of garlic mustard have two characteristic bends. The first occurs just before the stem, so that in most cases the stem is at a right angle to the root. The second bend is a little farther down and not so sharp.

Cluster of baby grapes on a vine
in my friend's backyard.

Another garlic-mustard flower, this one in MO.

My six-year-old pulls while my four-year-old pushes my friend's son in a wagon. In the background is a peach tree (on the right). It already had miniature peaches on it.

I'm fairly certain this is an avocado tree
growing in the drainage ditch at my friend's house.

My six-year-old pretending he's going to fall off the swing. These friends (different from the ones with the honeysuckle and avocado) grow fresh garlic in their garden. I'm planning to give it a try (I've also heard it deters certain critters).

OK, let's see how well you paid attention to my Easter post. Can you find the wood sorrel in this picture of my friend's back yard? There are violet leaves as well, but no flowers yet.