Reviews of plant foraging guidebooks

After first encountering this unusual and delicious brassica in the Scottish highlands, I was delighted to stumble on it again in my favourite bit of Galloway swamp – 10 minutes from my house…

One of the great pleasures of foraging is discovering exciting flavours in the common and innocuous-looking plants around us. Sea arrowgrass never fails to raise squeals of surprise and delight when we encounter it on my guided coastal walks.

I get a lot of requests online for help identifying wild foods – especially fungi. I welcome these – it is a pleasure to help people improve their knowledge and gives me an opportunity to sharpen my identification skills. Win-win. But I feel a little guidance to people looking for help with ID would make the exchange more useful to both them and me…

No matter how hard I try when serving my wild food tasting menus, this elderberry vinegar always steals the show when served as a simple wild salad dressing. It is fruity, thick and very sweet, with a depth of flavour that puts it on a par with, if not beyond, the very finest balsamic vinegars. It actually got a “wow” from the team at Andrew Fairlie’s restaurant at Gleneagles…