Winter foraging - the gift of joy!
Looking at the small details in nature makes the winter gloom bearable. Get outside for sanity, give the gift of nature and a sneak preview into next year's courses.
Foraging in Winter
With winter in all its glory taking fast hold of the landscape you may think there’s nothing left on the land to forage. But in actual fact, it just means you need to more curious, adventurous and enthusiastic in your foraging. Take for example…
These are tasty winter chanterelles! Throughout the winter I often find oyster mushrooms, velvet shanks, jelly ears, green oysterlings and porcelain fungus, quickly followed by scarlet elfcups. There are also salads to be found - pink purslane, hairy bittercress, wintercress, sorrel and, tucked into sheltered corners, even chickweed.
Most of all I keep going out for my mental health. Before I started foraging a lot I used to find the winters intolerable. The low light levels, the gloom, the cold! Even indoors. With LED lighting having replaced bright bulbs I often find myself using a head torch to read, mend clothes and scratch away with my pyrography pen. An entry from my diary a few years ago - which became my book The Wilderness Cure - records it well:
“Today the sun is shining. In Scotland at this time of year there are few daylight hours. The sun is barely up by 08.45 and not sooner is it up than it sets again at 15.45. On an overcast day we are just sunk into perpetual gloom. The Scots have great words to describe the weather: dowie, draggled, dreep, dreich, drear, dribble, drookit, dour.”
However, going outside is definitely the cure!
Have you noticed the catkins on the birches and hazel yet? These are male flowers getting ready for the spring when they will release their pollen. A sure sign that life will return in a few months. Lift the leaf mould on a south-facing slope and you may well find wild garlic shoots. Pink purslane waits for all the wild grasses and buttercups to die down, then uses winter to enjoy its day in the pale sun. It’s these little details and discoveries that brighten the days.
Soon we will reach the Winter Solstice which occurs just before Christmas. The word ‘solstice’ comes from the Latin solstitium meaning ‘sun standing still’ when the sun appears to stop and change direction. Planet Earth tilts a little on its axis. The solstice is the point at which the angle of the tilt just can’t go any further and, like a giant pendulum, the relationship between the sun and the earth changes. From this day, Friday 22 December (03:27 GMT to be exact) the length of daylight starts to increase again minute by minute – although you won’t notice the effect until early January.
Marking the days by noticing Nature’s signs and observing all the festivals - both modern and ancient - helps me to pace the winter. The Winter Solstice (Yule); then the festivities of Christmas; protecting the boundaries on the Day of the Kings (6 Jan); the Wassail; and finally the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc, celebrated overnight between 31st January and 1st February. This was considered the first day of the Celtic Spring. It celebrates the return of the light and candles were lit overnight to give thanks. It was followed by the Anglo Saxon Candlemas - not dissimilar to the Hindu and Sikh Diwali festival of lights.
A new practice this year, to counteract the temptation to hibernate under a duvet, was to spend a few minutes each morning describing the sunrise in a single paragraph. It is amazing how different each morning was! Here was the first one:
“The half-leafless trees are fuzzily silhouetted against a thick, glowing band of smeared lipstick red. Eventually this fades and the sun, a mere pinprick of yellow light, attempts to mount the horizon. After two attempts it gains some momentum and, suddenly focused on the task with laser torch intensity, it launches itself into the new day. Exhausted by the effort, it then hangs weakly, low in the pallid wintry sky. Crawling across the southern horizon is all it will manage today. Heating the earth is out of the question.”
Then for fun I condensed it into a haiku
autumnal dawn —
smeared lipstick sky
misty white sheets
I hope you all find ways to keep sane and chase away the winter blues!
New Foraging Courses for 2024
We have some Spring Hedgerow Foraging Days in Central Scotland and Autumn Wild Mushroom Days in Perthshire now on sale. So if you are buying someone a Foraging Voucher for Christmas they can book on a course early. I will also be adding some of my Seaweed Forages shortly as soon as I’ve checked the tide tables!
Learn to forage with Mo or wild food expert, Matthew Rooney. Discover delicious wild vegetables and edible trees. Find out how to identify common plants, learn about their use as wild foods, in drinks and crafts, and sample their unusual tastes…
Solstice Ceremony in Cumbria
I invite you to reserve your place now for the Solstice Wilderness Crossing in June 2024 as they book up fast. This five-day retreat, centred around a solo fasting day, creates the space for clearer insight into your life. Do you feel called to make a change? Need space in your life to find a new direction, a new vision? Take the best path at a crossroads? Or want to reflect on, celebrate and mark a transition?
When we encounter Nature, without the distraction of our phones and day-to-day lives, we perceive signs and symbols that bring meaning to our lives. I love this work because, in my own experience, being able to interpret them allows deep changes - in the way that I think and frame my life - to happen. Whenever I need to understand myself and my purpose, Nature always offers guidance when I take the time to observe. Being in ceremony, with a small group in an awe-inspiring landscape, has a powerful magic! Our perception of reality alters and broadens, forming a framework that is much more flexible and multi-faceted than what the conscious mind perceives.
Join me for a wilderness threshold crossing and guided rite of passage ceremony in the beautiful fells of the Lake District. For more information click the button below.
“The threshold crossing was a profoundly simple yet deeply meaningful way to enter into a dialogue with wild nature. The guides held the space beautifully, supporting our individual intentions as a group and co-creating a meaningful community of complete strangers.”
~ Participant, 2023
The Perfect Stocking Filler!
I’ve had the greatest amusement (and slight discombobulation) of seeing myself turned into an animé-style cartoon for the publication of my book The Wilderness Cure in South Korea with bookie_pub! Hopefully it will also be coming out in Polish in 2024.
If you haven’t already read The Wilderness Cure, now might be the perfect moment to treat yourself (or a loved one) to a copy for Christmas! It is the diary of my year living entirely off free, foraged food reflecting on how food makes us human, and what bringing the wild within can mean for ourselves and the planet. This experience in turn provided the inspiration for the Wildbiome™️ Project, a study of 24 foragers eating only wild food for 1 month and 3 months. Read the Wildbiome™️ Project results here. The Wilderness Cure is available from all good bookshops and online booksellers. Also available on Audible if you’d rather hear me read it.
Thank you. Here is today’s sunrise:
Without warning, the black branched beeches step out of the flat, featureless, impenetrable white wall of fog. Their sudden, abrupt appearance almost menacing. Somewhere, far away, the sun must be rising.
white wall fog
only black twigs survive —
sunrise elsewhere
I just ordered a copy of your book, really looking forward to reading it! I love the sunrise haiku you do, what an incredible way to begin each day. Definitely going to try that. I’ve been writing little haiku for some of the organisms I gather here and there in my journal. I was inspired to do this after reading the book Kinoko recently (about fungi in Japanese culture). I feel like doing this is such a wonderful way to celebrate them and the ways they enrich our life. If I ever make it to Scotland one of your walks will absolutely be on my list of things to do.