HONEY attracts bees. Cabbages are beloved of caterpillars. Greenfly can’t seem to get enough of roses. And in the same vein, fauna and flora novices are drawn like a magnet to wild food expert Rob Caton.
Even hidden away in the back of a khaki-coloured 4x4 bumping along the narrow track towards Wallington’s walled garden, these tenacious rookie plantsmen can track him down.
Rob and National Trust rangers Tom Garwood and Mathew Watson are on a mission of their own to find, cook and eat some ground elder (easier than it sounds as since being introduced by the Romans it has managed what its masters never could: to conquer the country in perpetuity) when a woman leading a dog frantically waves them down.
Mathew brings the Ford Ranger to a halt. “I hope you can help me,” she says smiling past the driver to where Rob is sat.
“My collie keeps eating this strange plant. I think it might be dog’s mercy.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” replies Rob as he opens the door and leaps out. “Dog’s mercy is extremely poisonous. Your collie looks too intelligent to make that mistake. Did you know the collie’s closest relative is the wolf?”
There then ensues a near 10-minute discussion between the pair as they try to narrow down the woodland delicacy the collie can’t seem to get enough of.
Eventually Rob says: “I think we can safely say she has acquired the taste for wild garlic. A very sensible dog if you ask me. It’s great eaten on its own.”
With the owner momentarily lost for words Rob seizes his chance to escape back into the pick-up and Mathew makes a sedate getaway.
“That was lucky,” Rob says a few seconds later as he holds up a plastic bag full of wild raspberries. “A few millimetres more and there would have been no need for me to puree these.”
The wild raspberries – enough to fill an average-sized supermarket punnet – were foraged just feet away from Wallington’s visitor car park.
Proof, as Tom points out, that you don’t need to walk for miles to find free food. Not that Rob, who runs Byrness-based outdoor adventure provider Wildharmony, would normally advocate eating anything found growing so close to cars.
“Too much pollution,” he explains, “but then again, we are in the middle of the countryside even if we are in a car park.”
The group has just got back from a long and fruitless hunt on the wider Wallington estate for the funnel- shaped, egg-yolk coloured chanterelle mushroom which Rob had been planning to cook up for rangers Tom and Mathew to try.
Thankfully there is always a plan B: wild raspberries, which look just like their cultivated cousins but with a more intense flavour, and ground elder. Rob has never tried combining the two ingredients. But, as he says with an impish grin: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Hence why the Ford is bouncing towards the walled garden. A phone call (this is foraging 21st century style) to Wallington’s head gardener, John Ellis, had provoked the response that despite his team’s best efforts they still haven’t been able to eradicate the ground elder – although thankfully it has been banished to no-man’s land over the far side of the wall.
Ground elder is the bane of gardeners everywhere. Centuries after the Romans departed these shores, the battle is still being fought – and lost – against their unwanted gift to the nation. But the Romans didn’t introduce it just to annoy gardeners 2000 years on. They brought it with them because they enjoyed eating it.
Ground elder is great eaten raw in salads (and with so much of it around, cheaper than the expensive bags of mixed supermarket leaves), cooked in stews, casseroles, soups and steamed like spinach.
Rob works on the principle that “a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place”. In this case, too close to Wallington’s walled garden for comfort.
Rob’s preferred way of eating it is flash fried with a generous knob of salted butter.