Common Dog-violet, Viola riviniana, is the most common violet in the UK and provides some useful herbage for a wild salad. The leaves have a pleasant flavour with only a little bitterness and making it a wild food worth picking up as you forage, particularly in the spring. It flowers March to May and is then easy to spot but a little less so at other times. The leaves and flowers are edible…
The primrose is widespread throughout the UK and Europe. The flowers and leaves are often described as edible but there is research that suggests handling the plant might cause allergic contact dermatitis in some people…
Brooklime, Veronica beccabunga, is an edible leafy green plant of damp freshwater places. You can eat the leaves and stem. The name may be unfamiliar but the plant is relatively common. You’ll find brooklime growing in boggy ground (the sort in which you’d wished you’d worn boots, not shoes), on the damp margins of ponds, streams and rivers and sometimes…
The pignut, Conopodium majus, is one of the most palatable wild foods. The tuber can be eaten raw and is very tasty. To the uninitiated, pignuts can be hard to spot, particularly in the spring. But once you’ve been shown and know in which places to look, they are surprisingly common. Leaves appear in the spring, then…
Having been given a copy of John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman’s ‘SAS Survival Handbook’ when I was 13 years old, I spent a disproportionate amount of my mid-teens devising ingenious ways to cram more and more survival kit into a tobacco tin. At the weekend I’d go…