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Mo Wilde is an award-winning forager, herbalist, and author whose life bridges ancient plant wisdom and modern science. From a childhood learning plant lore in Kenya, to studying herbal medicine at 50, to a year eating only wild food in Scotland, her journey is one of deep connection with nature. We recently sat down with Mo, who shared with us how foraging became her life’s work, why it’s about far more than food, and how we can enter the world of foraging ourselves.
During my Kenyan childhood, I was outdoors a lot and was lucky to be around people who knew plant lore and sparked my interest. I was also a voracious reader. My favourite books were about the skills and craft of American First Nations people, who also spoke of wild plants and their medicinal uses. So I grew up just assuming that everyone knew about plants and used them in different ways – whether in Kenya, America, or the UK. My view of Nature was that she was benevolent and generous, as well as a comforting retreat from the confusing world of adults.
Work took me in different directions, triggered by the need to provide for my children as a single mother with the skills that I had. I’d gone to art college originally but had continuously studied and used herbal medicine since my late teens. After a GP’s wrong diagnosis I wanted to know everything that I could about my own body and how to stay healthy. Whilst I’ve had a long relationship with plants, I just didn’t know back then that ethnobotany or herbalism could be a profession. I have still never heard of a school careers adviser that suggested ‘forager’ or ‘herbalist’ as a career choice. So I was a late starter and got my Masters degree when I was 50!
It’s hard to go back and remember a specific moment – perhaps the wild passion fruit of my childhood in Tigoni. When my children were little I recall Scottish summers foraging chanterelles, mussels and sea lettuce on the Assynt coast. Around that time I was given the opportunity to teach foraging for the Scottish Forestry Commission. Soon after the internet and social media came along. I advertised a few courses, and one thing led to another. So I’ve been teaching for around 20 years now.
I did succeed. My year of eating only wild food had its challenges but it was hugely satisfying to know that I could live only off what Nature provided, and that it was really good for my health – physically, mentally and spiritually. My award-winning book ‘The Wilderness Cure: ancient wisdom in a modern world’ covers that year and looks at our relationship with Nature. Really, foraging is just an entry point to a much deeper ‘communion’ with the wild, both without and within. This is why people who become avid foragers also become passionate advocates for nature and ecological guardians. It is about so much more than just taking.
You will need a book or a teacher, e.g. through the Association of Foragers, to help you learn the finer points of what is edible and what to avoid. In my recent book ‘Free Food: Wild plants and how to eat them’ I suggest some approaches to starting foraging and how to do it mindfully. My favourite is to choose one new plant on a Sunday and study it for a week. Find and identify it, handle it taste it, draw it, cook with it. Learn everything you can about it – Where does it like to grow? How abundant is it? What part can be used? Appreciate its gifts to us as every plant, without exception, has a gift - even invasive or toxic ones. By the end of two years you’ll know over 100 plants intimately and how to harvest them sustainably in your area. I suggest you learn about the plants in relation to their families as then everything makes so much more sense. We all have the capacity to learn as humans are excellent at noticing small details.
Foraging changes as entire food groups move in and out of season not just the plants and their parts, or the fungi. I particularly like the early spring (Earrach) for seaweeds and shellfish; spring for delicious salad greens, wild garlic and tender steamed shoots; summer for fragrant flowers for desserts, berries, and tangy estuary vegetables such as glasswort, sea plantain and sea arrowgrass; autumn for brambles, nuts, rosehips and mushrooms; winter for diving into my supplies of pickles and relishes.
Different habitats are colonised by different species. So you move around according to where the foods are for the season that you’re in. For example, in March there is still little growing inland but the seaweeds have their spring early so it’s a great time to be at the coast. In general though, the most prolific harvesting areas are often on land that humans have disrupted. This allows opportunistic species like the Brassicaceae – the cabbage family – space to grow. So field margins, lanes, riversides…
My favourites tend to be plants or fungi that are just coming into season after a period of scarcity. It makes me appreciate them so much more. I love that longing in June for the first wild strawberries; the excitement of the first summer chanterelles cooked simply in butter with garlic, cream and black pepper; the green April shoots of common hogweed – hogweed tempura is the only reason I own a deep fat fryer!
After my year eating only wild food I have been encouraging others to have a go too. I’ve been running a study called ‘The Wildbiome Project’ and, this spring, 100 people joined to eat only wild food for either 1 or 3 months. The participants anthropometric results and blood tests have been fascintating and I’m currently trying to crowdfund to pay for all their stool samples to be analysed too. To monitor the nutrient content of all the wild foods they’ve been eating, I created an app called EatWild.app with lots of recipes and foraging tips that anyone can use. There is also a documentary called ‘Our Wildbiome’ about the first study group. Next year, we’ll be running the project again in the autumn, in conjunction with Bradford University. This work really enriches our knowledge of these ancestral foods that we once ate exclusively.
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