in praise of wild garlic

and secrets and spring and learning to trust again, somehow

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

Last Sunday I drove out to my secret wild garlic patch in outer North London. Unlike the blackberry patch in Kensal Green Cemetery, the crab apple and plum trees in Wormwood Scrubs and my local elderflowers bushes, which all get marauded within hours of bearing fruit and blossoms, the wild garlic patch has remained pristine and untouched since I discovered it about five years ago during lockdown.

Urban foragers are a lonely, competitive tribe united mainly by suspicion and an intense desire to avoid each other. You won’t find any precise location information about our haunts on the internet. Picking wild food in the secret green corners of a big city is about the joy of discovery followed by years fierce secret-guarding. Later today I will make a year’s worth of pesto and herb butter with my harvest, most of which I will give away to close friends — but I will not tell a single one of them where my patch is.

I haven’t been back to the wild garlic patch since before the end of my marriage and returning felt a bit strange, like a reunion with my former self. I saw shades of her slipping round the edges the forest, a woman who was both happier and more guarded than the new me, who laughed a lot in spite of the pain she was hiding and somehow had the energy and appetite for small pleasures like walks in the woods and making a pesto lasagna for her family.

For the first time this spring I decided to bring a friend along to the patch. It was a risk, but that’s true of everything involving other people. Four hands would make the picking easier, and the company would be soothing, but would there be enough for both of us? Could I trust him with my secret?

The garlic patch sits far back on the wooded shores of an estuary-that-shall-remain-nameless, not far from a major motorway. Getting to it is tricky. You have to find the right path and know where to veer off it then wade through a bog full of rubbish, braving the underbrush and high thorny brambles. My forearms and ankles now look as if they’ve been lashed with willow switches in some circa-1985 Soho dungeon. Having said that, there is pleasure in suffering for wild garlic, especially early on in the season. It is sweetest just after the first warm spell when the leaves are still nubile and tender. In the past I’ve felt guilty for picking the plant before it’s been allowed to flower and re-seed itself, but I was pleased to see the patch had thrived in my absence.

It’s comforting to know that while my life was unravelling, the wild garlic was growing abundant, spreading itself out generously over the forest floor. We picked for hours and did not get through half of it. I should not have worried. There was more than enough for both of us.

Even in uncertainty, there are surprises to be found in the undergrowth and this is especially true in March. The season is turning. Spring again, finally. I’m learning to trust it.