Foraging: Secrets of the British Wood

And it is not only plants. Poke a bright pink blob on a rotting log and it bleeds a pink paste: not a plant and not a fungus, but a slime mould, with its own following online. The biggest living thing on Earth is not a whale or a redwood, it is a fungus, spreading unseen beneath the forest floor. One ordinary-looking plant is a single living clone, brought here in Victorian times, now quietly rewriting whole habitats and pushing up through tarmac and brick. Learning to read things like these is learning to see the plants, the fungi and the wood itself as one connected, living thing, and to understand an ecosystem as it changes.

Long before pharmacies and supermarkets, this is where everything came from. The first pain relief came out of willow bark. The drug still used to steady the heart is made from a flower pretty enough for any garden and poisonous enough to leave well alone. Beer was brewed and cleared for centuries with a creeping weed, back when brewing was half medicine and half witchcraft. An expert forager carries the biology, the history, the medicine and the ecology of all of it as one body of knowledge, and moves through it without flagging the joins.

For a teenager already drawn to any of those subjects, this is the working version. For one still figuring out where their interests lie, two hours with someone who carries all of it at once is one of the more useful afternoons they will spend this year.