Wild food from the park – catch-up time #1: July

July? JULY? I realise I haven’t blogged for nearly two months. But time, as ever, rolls on. We have been continuing with our attempts to find different things to eat from the seasonal wild food popping up each month in our local park, the King's Park in Stirling and then writing about it for you - and there’s lots to be written about and, hopefully, read about and so - on on!

July brought some new items to the King’s Park wild food menu, plus more of some we’ve already had. The raspberry canes continued to produce a great crop of juicy sweet berries and we continued to pick them and eat them off the bush or with yoghurt, or freeze them. By the end of July, we did manage to gather and freeze a total of 6kg of berries, which will last us the rest of the year in various uses.

Fine wild raspberries in their prime at the peak of the season

In early July, I spent the weekend (Wimbledon Finals weekend, I think) involved in making this TV show (yes, I'm somewhere in the choir!) and returned home on a warm and beautiful summer evening to find that O had constructed this delight:

They look great, don't they?

It is a chardonnay jelly with wild raspberries (based on a recipe from Nigella Lawson) and was pretty special eaten cold from the fridge, in the garden on a (rare) warm July evening!

We also used the raspberries in a jug of Pimms (posh, what?) with some mint leaves from the garden, shown here with some garlic bread made using the wild garlic pesto we made in April:

Another highly seasonal appearance for a few weeks in July, and a very welcome and exciting one for a wild food project, is the emergence of the flowers of the lime tree.

Lime tree flowers

I wrote about lime trees previously here. Lime blossom is surely one of the most fragrant of any of our native plants and ranks up at the top of my favourite native flower scents, along with honeysuckle. It is also, after air-drying for a few days, the ingredient for the traditional linden blomen tea.  

Air drying lime flowers on the window ledge. A few in a teapot or a couple in a mug with boiling water makes a great drink.

In his mighty 'Flora Britannica', Richard Mabey says of lime trees: “All groups of lime trees, of whatever species, are wonderfully fragrant when in full blossom in July. They are also the noisiest of trees at this time, and the roar of bees in them can often be heard 50 yards away. The blossom makes a rich tea, tilleul, which was recommended as a mild sedative during the last war.” 

Roger Phillips, in his 'Wild Food' book, proffers the following information: “The flowers are used to make linden tea which is famous for its delicious taste and soothing effect on the digestive and nervous system. Honey from lime flowers is regarded as the best flavoured and most valuable in the world and is used extensively in medicine and liqueurs.”

On the warm July morning when I gathered the lime blossom above, the avenue of lime trees in the Park was bathed in a wonderful honey-like scent from the lime blossom and bees were busy, noisily gathering nectar and pollen in the trees. A few of the dried lime flowers above, in a mug with boiling water, makes a scented slightly sweet infusion. Kept in an airtight jar, we’ve found that dried lime flowers will retain this potential for many months, well over a year in fact.

We also made a couple of major batches of elderflower cordial in July although, rather foresightedly, I published a photo of the summer’s whole production in the post on June’s wild food experiences, here – which was written in July. Here’s a photo of the July cordial anyway, just for completeness!

But that wasn’t the end of the cordial developments in July. Despite the general lack of wetlands in the King’s Park (partly down to the major drainage work for the golf course over a large proportion of the park), there are a few wee wet corners and, in one of them in July, we found lots of the large native wetland plant meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria). I wrote previously about meadowsweet in one of my posts of the Ladybird seasons books, here, and mentioned it as the original source of aspirin and that’s an issue for its use to produce cordial.

The recipe we used, from the wild food book 'Seafood andeat it' by Xa Milne and Fiona Houston, points out that people who are allergic to aspirin should avoid it. A better reason for avoiding it would be that it is pretty harsh. The recipe had too much lemon for my tastes and I found the aspirin flavour to be a bit off-putting. Still, I've made a couple of litres and I ought to drink it:

Meadowsweet cordial

 and it is more palatable with some apple juice added so all is not yet lost!

That’s all from the Park for that month but a July wild food addendum was our first chanterelles of the year. We visited our good friend Kathy in deepest Aberdeenshire and her local wood had a few good quality chanterelles which we enjoyed for breakfast:

Signs of the times: Summer #7

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

 

"Many a long hard-working day

Life brings us! and many an hour of play;

But they never come now together.

Playing at work, and working in play,

As they came to us children among the hay,

In the breath of the warm June weather.

Oft with our little rakes at play,

Making believe at making hay,

With grave and steadfast endeavour;

Caught by an arm, and out of sight

Hurled and hidden, and buried light

In laughter and hay for ever."

Dora Greenwell, Haymaking (1865)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Summer Picture 7

I’m a bit excited. I accept that, as sources of excitement go, this is pretty tame but this picture, Summer picture 7, is the one selected to represent all of Summer’s glory as the cover picture for the book “What to Look for in Summer”. And I contend that it would be difficult to argue with swallows, roses, elderflowers, butterflies and hay-making as iconic images of a British summer scene. For the farmer in the picture, on his little tractor, is indeed making hay while the sun shines, as high Summer flourishes all around him.

Swallows were featured in an earlier post, when their arrival was noted in Spring picture 12, so I’ll say no more here except to note that, as they are very busy hawking flies in midsummer, they are probably feeding young, perhaps by now a second brood, the first having flown the nest already. The Meadow Brown butterflies in the foreground (Latin name: Maniola jurtina) are identified in my copy of the State of the Butterflies of Britaina dn Ireland report (produced by a partnership led by Butterfly Conservation) as the most abundant butterfly species in Britain (i.e. the most individuals recorded in surveys), as well as the second most widely distributed (in terms of the number of 10 kilometre squares where the species is recorded), after the Green-veined White butterfly (watch out for your cabbages, missus!).  Since the Summer book was first published (my copy says 1960, exactly 50 years ago this year), the Meadow Brown has been doing well. A generalist species of grassland habitats including downland, heathland, coastal dunes and undercliffs, hay meadows, roadside verges, hedgerows, woodland rides and clearings, waste ground, parks, gardens, and cemeteries, its population is estimated to have increased by 28% between 1976 and 2004 (although there was a slight decrease of -5% in the final few years of that period).

Of the wild plants featured in this picture, the accompanying text says: “The wild, briar rose and elder are the flowers that most distinctly speak of June and midsummer.” The fact is that, as you’ll notice, we are in July and midsummer is nearly three weeks behind us – a typical condition of this series is me struggling to keep up with the timetable of the books, consoling myself only with the fact that the timing of natural events in a Scottish summer is likely to be lagging behind those down south by at least a couple of weeks. As such, even last week, I could look out of my window and see numerous elder bushes in the park, resplendent with their umbrellas of creamy white flowers. And yet,only this weekend, the lovely O and I struggled to find the few remaining accessible flower heads on those elder bushes, to make a final batch of elderflower cordial.

The elder (Sambucus nigra) is indeed an important food plant in the British countryside, which I talked about in Spring here, and promised to talk about in more detail once it appeared in flower in this current Summer picture. The black shiny elder berries that occur later in the year in great bunches like miniature grapes have long been a mainstay of the home-made wine manufactories of rural Britain. But it is the flowers that O and I relish and cherish – in particular, we make litres and litres of fragrantly-scented elderflower cordial every June and July, aiming to produce enough to see us through the long, cold winter with regular tastes of summer sunlight captured in golden liquid form. We’ve managed to produce about 15 litres this year. We use a recipe which includes the use of citric acid powder to prevent any fermentation.

Last year, for the first time, we also made elderflower champagne, which IS, obviously, allowed to ferment. I confess that, although we made about 6 litres, we haven’t tried it yet, even though it is supposed to be drinkable after a week! Now I’m a bit scared, both of the gas pressure in the 2 litre plastic bottles, and the potential alcohol content. But, versatile wild crop that it is, the elder’s flowers can also be eaten, both raw and dipped in batter and deep fried as tempura (which is just a posh way of a Scottish man justifying yet another opportunity dip a piece of perfectly innocent food in batter and deep fry the hell out of it! Deep-fried Mars Bar, anyone? No thanks!). I have to say, elderflower tempura was pleasantly, surprisingly, tasty! The raw flowers are also OK, but I do find the texture a bit odd. Incidentally, the elder is also home to the edible fungus known colloquially as “jew’s ear”, a bit of unfortunate anti-Semitic nomenclature, if ever I heard one. This weekend, we found a neglected corner of King’s Park in Stirling where a few old elder trees are covered in growths of this fungus, some of which, inevitably, we are going to end up eating! I’ll let you know how it goes...

The New Atlas of the Flora of Britain and Ireland indicates that, since 1962 when the original Atlas came out, the overall distribution of elder hasn't changed, but that it is impossible to tell introduced populations from natural ones, as it is both widely planted by people and also spread widely as seeds in bird droppings.

The wild rose dominating the bottom left corner of the picture is the dog rose, Rosa canina, although that Latin name hides a more complicated story, where a number of related groups of wild roses are brigaded under the rosy collective of a Rosa canina “aggregate”. There are also a number of hybrids of Rosa canina and other rose species and, indeed, other, completely separate wild rose species, all also referred to as “dog roses”! No-one said it had to be easy... Anyway, Rosa canina is the commonest and most widespread of these. The New Plant Atlas , while pointing out its complicated family relationships, suggests that its distribution is probably stable over the period since the publication of the 1962 Atlas. Maybe more in Autumn on rose hips and their contribution to our wild food larder...

The final element of the picture worthy of comment is the hay-making process in the background, not least to point out how the general process remains basically the same 50 years later, even although the machinery has changed, particularly the tractor. Grow grass, cut it when the weather is dry, let it dry out a bit in rows on the ground where it was cut, then gather it up to store it. Now, hay is baled; back when this picture was painted, it was a slightly different storage method, as you wil see in the next Summer picture.

A final sartorial point to note – the farmer on his tractor is wearing a pair of red dungarees – surely all farmers now wear blue ones! In fact, the boiler suit has probably largely replaced dungarees as the favoured protection for the hard working agriculture operative! And I am not sure if the flatcap, which seems to be ubiquitous on all agricultural employees featured in these four Ladybird books, has survived through to today as an obligatory piece of farmer’s protective clothing (although, obviously, still much loved by rural huntin’, shootin’ toff-types!).