The British hedgerow gives a reliable, seasonal, free supplement to a household's food, and it is a supplement rather than a supply. This page covers the dozen or so plants that are common, easy to identify with certainty, and worth the walk.
It also covers the small number of things that will genuinely hurt you, because in Britain that list is short and specific and it is entirely learnable.
The rules that come first
Read the rules and the law of foraging before you pick. In short: picking fungi, flowers, fruit and foliage for yourself is not theft in England and Wales, uprooting without permission is a criminal offence, and access land gives no right to take anything.
Then the safety rules, which are shorter:
- Certainty, or nothing. Not "I'm fairly sure". If there is any doubt, leave it. There is no wild food in Britain worth a poisoning.
- Identify on several features together: leaf, stem, flower, smell, habitat, season. One feature is how people get it wrong.
- Learn the dangerous plants first, not the edible ones. Knowing what will hurt you is a much shorter list and a far better use of a winter.
- Clean ground only. Not roadsides, sprayed margins, dog-walking routes below knee height, or land downstream of anything.
- Wash everything.
- Introduce anything new in small amounts. People react individually, and a small first portion is sensible.
The umbellifers, which are the ones that kill
Spring
Nettle tops. The best wild green in Britain, everywhere, and unmistakable. Pick the top four leaves of young plants before they flower. Gloves. See nettles and common wild greens.
Wild garlic, also called ramsons. Broad soft leaves, white starburst flowers, damp woodland, and an unmistakable garlic smell when crushed. Crush a leaf and smell it every single time, because the lookalikes are dangerous. See the wild greens page for the detail.
Hawthorn leaves. The young spring leaves, sometimes called bread and cheese, are mild and pleasant in a salad. Hawthorn is easy to know: lobed leaves, thorns, and it is in half the hedges in Britain.
Dandelion leaves. Bitter, better young and blanched under a pot. Abundant and unmistakable.
Cleavers, or goosegrass. The sticky one that clings to clothes. Young shoots are usable cooked, and it is more of a spring tonic than a food.
Early summer
Elderflower. Creamy flat heads of tiny cream flowers on a small tree with pithy stems, in June. Cordial, fritters, and it flavours everything. Pick on a dry sunny morning, shake out the insects, and do not wash it if you can avoid it because the scent is in the pollen.
Do not confuse elder with anything in the carrot family. Elder is a woody shrub or small tree with opposite compound leaves; the dangerous umbellifers are herbaceous plants with hollow or ridged stems. The habit of the plant is completely different once you have seen both.
Wild strawberry. Tiny, exquisite, and never in quantity. Worth knowing for children.
Late summer
Blackberries. The one everybody knows, from late July into October depending on the season and where you are. Pick the ripe black ones that come away easily.
Bilberries on acid upland, small and dark and worth the effort.
Hazelnuts in September, if the squirrels leave any, and they generally do not. Take them slightly early, in the husk, and ripen them indoors.
Crab apples. Small hard sour apples, excellent for jelly because they are high in pectin, and they set other fruit that will not set alone.
Plums, damsons and bullaces in old hedges and abandoned orchards.
Autumn
The main season, and the one that yields real quantity.
Elderberries. Hanging clusters of small purple-black berries in late summer and autumn.
Sloes. The fruit of blackthorn, small round blue-black plums with a bloom, on a viciously thorny hedge shrub. Mouth-drying and inedible raw. Traditionally picked after the first frost, and freezing them overnight does the same job by bursting the cells.
Rosehips. Very high in vitamin C, and the classic wartime syrup. Remove the seeds and the irritant hairs inside, which is the whole difficulty and is why hips are strained through a fine cloth rather than eaten whole.
Haws, the fruit of hawthorn. Mealy and mild, best as a jelly or a ketchup, and abundant in a good year.
Rowan berries. Bitter, and made into a jelly traditionally eaten with game. Cook them.
Sweet chestnuts in a good year, in the south. Not to be confused with horse chestnuts, which are conkers, are inedible and cause vomiting. Sweet chestnut husks are densely spiny all over; conker cases have sparse short spikes.
Beech mast and acorns. Acorns need extensive leaching to remove the tannins and are a real project rather than a snack.
Winter
Almost nothing, and that is worth stating because it is the season this app cares about most.
- A few late haws and hips hang on, increasingly poor.
- Some leaves persist in mild spells: chickweed, and sometimes hairy bittercress.
- Fungi are largely gone and the winter ones are not for beginners.
Which is why preserving the autumn is the actual skill, rather than winter foraging. Everything in the autumn section keeps well in some form: jelly, syrup, dried, or bottled. See water bath canning and drying food.
Winter is when hedgerow fruit matters most to wildlife, too, so leaving it is not sentiment. Birds and small mammals overwinter on it.
What it is honestly worth
Foraging is vitamins, flavour, variety and morale. It is not calories.
A good autumn afternoon might yield a few kilograms of blackberries or elderberries, which is a genuine addition to a store cupboard as jelly or syrup, and is a rounding error against a household's energy needs. See the arithmetic on grow for calories, not for salad.
What it is genuinely good for:
- Vitamin C in autumn and winter, from rosehips, which is not trivial on a stored-food diet.
- Flavour, which makes dull stored food eatable over months.
- Something for children to do that produces a result.
- Knowledge of your own area, which is the part that takes years and is the real asset.
And it is a resource that can be exhausted. In a hard year, a hedge stripped by the first person along it does not feed anybody later, and does not fruit as well the following season. Take a little from a lot.