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Mary Ann Kennedy and Lucy Cooke – The Wild Cooke – go foraging in search of nature’s precious bounty throughout Scotland. From year’s beginning to end, they range far and wide, bringing together rich but sustainably gathered culinary delights, with a Foraged Feast rounding off the series. 

 

Nine of us have gathered in the open grass of the hotel garden; grand white building on one side, leafy woodland on the other, with a sweeping field beyond dissected by a path that leads down to the loch. The sound of traffic going over the Ballachulish bridge is softened by distance, and all is otherwise still. We are staring at our feet.

 

Crouching down and reaching into the grass, Lucy advises us, “Your lawn will never be the same again.”

 

Lucy Cooke, also known as The Wild Cooke, runs workshops to share her foraging skills, passing on knowledge that once would have been common but has long been lost to so many. 

 

We start with white clover, most of us tentatively nosing the round cluster of petals, catching its sweet, honeyed scent, before we watch Lucy confidently pop one in her mouth and follow suit with our own nibbles. My senses (and having a sure teacher) tell me that this is good. My mind must make a conscious effort though to awaken itself to these instincts. Self-heal, daisy, yarrow, ribwort and broadleaf plantain follow: we’re asked if we can detect the mushroom undertones of the plantain, and initially I can’t. It’s on the second pass that my tastebuds detect a faint earthy hint beneath the astringent green. Can green be a flavour? I find myself falling back on it in my notebook, again and again in the absence of other words to describe these new-old flavours.

 

As we meander slowly, Lucy talks about how the Western diet now includes barely any bitter foods, and how frequent foraging can change and refine our palates. In just a few short hours we’re introduced to a landscape full of texture, the swathe of green around the woodland becomes ling and bell heather, wild raspberries, blaeberries, elder, chanterelles, nettles, and vetch; the salt marsh becomes orache, scurvy grass, sea aster, samphire, sea campion, sea arrow, sorrel, and silverweed. The names alone are poetry. Picked out and placed on our tongues, the woods and shoreline become alive with a possibility we knew must be there but had no knowledge with which to access. This well-known foraging phenomenon, of getting the eye in, of being able to see the edge of things – of noticing – is called lifting the green veil.

 

Sure enough, in the days that follow, the tangle of random growth in the banks and ditches around my house starts to define. I harvest clover, and now have a jar of dried flowerheads on the shelf beside the Tetley for tea. When I gather salad from the polytunnel I pick both spinach and leaves off the fat hen I was previously weeding out. And on the road by the shore, on verges I’ve walked past time and time again, for the first time I see the pale shine of silverweed where before there was only green.