A collective group of animals - real or imagined - is called a bestiary. There is no such literary exactness for a gathering of plants. This is not because we are reluctant to gather such things (here is one on the meaning of flowers) but because how we collect and name botany is more nuanced than imagined.

As a blossom opens its palm to us or a leaf breaks its tree attachment, the ever-present, ever-pulsing response to our trips around the sun and tilting on the axis are emblems of time, change, and ultimately, mortality. So the study of seasonal timings of biological/plant events is called phenology. Not long ago seasonal change - the weather, the harvest, and what was available in the wild - was everything to everyone. Today, technology insulates us against such change and reduces it to a beauty capsule, a hobby, or a meteorological update.

In Britain especially, there remains a passionate movement of foraging, wild-seeking people who respect the earth's bounty outside of what is cultivated, wrapped in plastic, and put on shelves. If you foraged or have ever found yourself wondering if a particular nut would kill you or be the best thing you've ever tasted, The Forager's Calendar by life-long forager John Wright is for you. Mine is dogeared, mud-spotted, tea-stained, and has proven very useful. I've gathered a few of my favourite extracts here. Enjoy!

Wood Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae)

The Wood Ear, Jelly Ear as it is variously known, is common all year round. But in the winter months, notably January, it is most abundant and at its best. The last of these three names is all down to the unlikely legend that Judas Iscariot hanged himself on an Elder tree (the fungus's preferred habitat). I prefer to stick with Wood Ear, even though the regrettable association is immovably recorded in the Latin name. 'Ear' is certainly appropriate, as it can look startlingly like an ear. Although their flavour is mild, it is very easily strengthened and modified. Wash your fresh Wood Ears, snipping off bits that you do not much like the look of them, then dry them until they are completely shrivelled. They will keep indefinitely if stored in a place. When you come to use them, reconstitute them with a vegetable or, better still, mushroom stock.

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta)

Hairy and Wavy Bittercresses are notorious weeds. They infest gardens, borders and planters, and can be seen growing in the gaps in the pavement, the bottom of walls and under street trees, where only the brave or foolhardy would collect anything. Tons of them must be uprooted every year by gardeners at their wits' end; if only they knew how good it is to eat, they would perform this duty with better grace. The flavour of them all is nutty, followed by peppery, when the chemicals that supply the heat are formed in the mouth. All above-ground parts of the Bittercresses are edible, so I usually uproot them completely, then cut off the muddy roots with scissors. Whatever you do with those shop-bought tubs of growing cress you can do with the Bittercresses.

Hairy bittercress. The texture of its early leaves is indeed hairy. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum)

Wild Garlic is one of the most giving of all wild foods: it has a long, long season of about five months, a wide and abundant distribution and is also very good to eat. Wild Garlic is extremely versatile in that it is a green leaf vegetable that tastes of garlic, and not just a bulb - so it has substance as well as flavour. Furthermore the flowers and young seed pods are also edible and good.

Wild Garlic has broad, ribbed, spear-shaped leaves, originating from a thin underground bulb. The flowers are white, six-petalled, to form a star, on individual short stalks arising from the tip of a long leafless stalk. The flowers set to produce green seed pods. To the untutored eye, the poisonous Lily of the Valley looks just the same, though its leaves are a less vibrant green. And it does not smell at all of garlic! Despite being a modern favourite with foragers, and even collected commercially on a substantial scale to supply restaurants, its virtues were little appreciated in the past. Writers would seldom mention the plant without comments such as 'easily recognised by its repulsive odour' or 'unpleasantly evident to the olfactories'. When Wild Garlic is recorded as a food, it is usually about how it is used in times of famine.

Dandelion (Taraxacum spp.)

The Dandelion, although an exquisitely beautiful plant, both individually and en masse, is invariably considered a weed by all but a handful of specialists, and anyone with a lawn or flowerbed will spend time and fortune attempting to eradicate it. Yet it does have its uses. All parts of the plant can be used in the kitchen, except the 'clocks' and the flower stem. The plant bides its time with a small, basal rosette during the winter. But with spring the fresh young leaves will shoot upwards. If you have never tried these, then you really must, just for the experience. Even though they are at their best, they are extremely bitter. Bitterness is a seldom appreciated flavour to the modern palate, but a few of these leaves in a salad will add to the overall complexity. Fortunately, there is a fix for the bitterness problem: forcing. Put a black bucket or flowerpot, with the hole covered, upside down on your best patch of Dandelions, just when the spring growth starts. After three weeks, the leaves will be long, thin, pale, and much sweeter. Or you can make dandelion syrup.

"Dazzle me, little sun-of-the-grass!" Illustration by Jackie Morris, courtesy of The Lost Words.

Sea Kale (Crambe maritima)

Sea Kale is my favourite plant, not because it is good to eat but because it looks so unlikely. A monstrous cabbage, incongruously sitting on a pebble beach, a single plant may be 1.5 m wide and tall, and it grows anew every year from deep and robust roots. The first time I saw one I was left awestruck. Sometimes they grow in their thousands. Sea Kale is not considered to be threatened, but it is common only in its fairly restricted habitat, so some care must be exercised when collecting any part. It most certainly must not be dug up for the roots.

Sea Kale is a strictly maritime plant, found on pebble and gravel beaches in many parts of Britain. There is almost nothing to see in February, save a few flower spikes from last season, but it is in February that you must make your preparations for the first of its edible components, the forced and blanched leaf shoots that are ready to cut in March. You need to know where a plant will appear. This is often given away by those spikes, provided a storm has not blown such indicators away. Gently scrape back the pebbles to reveal the roots, and possibly some very young shoots, then replace and add to them, forming a broad mound about 20 cm high.

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica) 
 
The humble Stinging Nettle is a fine example of a plant that can be picked in heroic quantities without the slightest rise of a conservational eyebrow. It is a weed, filling every damp, nitrogen-rich patch of ground in the kingdom with its cruel leaves. It is certainly the first plant everyone learns, and I recall my grandmother taking my four-year-old, short-trousered self for walks and sitting me on an iron bench through which Nettles grew. These were more robust times, and protestations went unheeded. Yet its familiarity has made it a much-loved plant, an old friend, albeit a prickly one. Poets have appreciated its character and made much use of it in verse. There are many, many more. 

Collecting Stinging Nettles requires preparation: big boots, thick trousers, long sleeves, pink rubber gloves. I always get stung and wonder if a beekeeping suit would be a sensible investment. Are they worth the danger? Well, the flavour is good, if mild, and they are extremely good for you, beating even kale in their list of components that aid health. The leaves need to be collected when the plant is young - about knee height. Only pick the top ten or so leaves by nipping the stem a few centimetres down from the top. These will be the freshest, and the stem will be soft and edible. Nettles are so common that you can afford to be choosy. Stop picking when the fine, drooping flower heads start to appear; the plant becomes coarse and the flavour less appealing by this time. Also, stomach-irritating and otherwise troublesome calcium oxalate crystals form in older plants. New young leaves will appear again if the plant has been cut back, with maybe two or three crops possible each year - right up until October. Whatever you can do with spinach, you can do with Nettles. Except salad.

Blooming nettles. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum) 
 
Many people enjoy the so-called edible snail, Helix pomatia, and good luck to them. I have spoken to some who have endless recipes for this mollusc, and they tell me that the Garden Snail is even better. If you wish to eat the snails consuming your lettuces instead of disposing of them by throwing them next door, then make sure they have not been eating anything poisonous, and purify them as I did, I can't think about this for much longer, so my brief advice is to put your purified victims in the fridge for an hour so that you can imagine they have fallen asleep, then boil them for fifteen minutes in a court bouillon. After that you are on your own, but Wild Garlic should be involved somewhere along the line. And remember, don't look at it before you pop one into your mouth.

What once were garden snails, now a collection of shells. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Beech (Fagus sulvatica)

There are two crops obtainable from Beech: one unreliable and nice, and one completely reliable but not to everyone's taste. Beech trees will, obviously, produce leaves every year, and the very young, shiny, hairy, light-green leaves are the best. These appear from late April to mid-May. Tasteless and chewy without any crunch is my take on them, but who says food has to taste good? If you are truly hungry, then young Beech leaves will taste fine enough. Apart from Beech-leaf salads and sandwiches, there is Beech leaf noyau. This really does taste good. Very young leaves are packed loosely into a jar and the jar topped up with gin or white rum. After two weeks to a month, the liquor is decanted off and a sugar syrup added. Beach arrives: Beech nuts. I sometimes wonder if I make an unnecessary fuss about collecting Beech nuts, as in the past they were gathered on an industrial scale. During and after the Second World War children were encouraged to collect them and offered about 7/6 d. (about £15 today) for a hundredweight (about 50 kg). The nuts were dried, disrobed of their shells and fed to pigs - a bit of a pity, as they are a more efficient and arguably tastier food when eaten without a porcine intermediary. Fifteen pounds is a substantial amount of money, but it is a lot of nuts - 400,000 by my calculation. But then, there was nothing on telly ... Unless you are as skilled and patient as Second World War children, Beech nuts will be an on-the-go snack, but I suggest going with at least one recipe, one from the First World War, which is simply to use them as a stuffing in squirrel.

Morel (Morchella esculenta) 
 
Morels are perhaps the most unreliable of all our wild foods. ..But despite their elusive nature, Morels seem extremely fond of human company. All of my finds have been in someone's garden or in the forest bark that surrounds the shrubbery in supermarket car parks. They are the most highly prized of all edible fungi after Truffles. Their flavour is strongly mushroomy, though, as with so many things, they are best when dried and powdered. Morels must always be cooked as they contain small quantities of toxins that have been known to cause problems but are removed by heat.

A morel mushroom drawn by Gertrude Jekyll to accompany her 1908 illustrated book Children and Gardens.

Laver (Porphra umbilicalis)

Laver, like a pot noodle, simply does not look edible. There the similarity between the two ends. Laver is an upper to mid-shore seaweed, often found draped over rocks, clinging to pebbles or attached to wracks and kelps (though the latter will be one of the allies, P. dioica). The most familiar of the habitats is on lone boulders sat on an otherwise sandy beach. It is remarkable-looking seaweed: a broad, thin, membranous sheet of translucent brown 'rubber', up to 30 cm across. In the sea it is quite a beauty, floating like a fine silk handkerchief. When the tide is out, it hangs in dark brown, shiny clumps, and if hanging very high up from, say, a concrete pillar, it looks like a sleeping bat.

Before anything remotely appetising can be made from fresh Laver it must be washed and cooked. It requires a great deal of washing to remove dirt, grit, the odd sand shrimp and occasional top-shell. Cooking Laver is a marathon. I once asked a lady minding the laverbread and cockle stall in Swansea market how long it takes. 'Ten hours,' she said. I have cooked it many, many times, and she is quite right. I use a preserving pan and cover the Laver in a few inches of water, put on the lid, bring it to the boil and leave it on the lowest possible simmer for eight and a half hours, stirring every twenty minutes or so. I then remove the lid and raise the heat a little and stir much more frequently. Once it has reduced to a paste, it is cooked. There are a couple of alternatives - overnight in a slow cooker set on 'low', or an hour sat in a heatproof bowl in a pressure cooker set on 'high'. In both cases you will need to do a bit more cooking.

Wild Strawberry (Fragaria vesca)

Wild Strawberries are sometimes found in woodland and quite commonly at the base of hedgerows, but the most likely place to find one is in the garden, where some well-meaning predecessor had sown a few seeds. It can then make a nuisance of itself, running everywhere, but it is pleasant to be able to nibble a few while are pottering, and gardeners are loath to uproot them. Newspaper reports from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently mention some new strawberry found by an enthusiast in the wild, and a few of these (larger-berried, usually) lineages made it into gardens. Shakespeare writes casually of garden strawberries in Richard III, when the eponymous king speaks.

Black Garden Ant (Lasius niger)

On a warm, still, balmy day in July or August, thousands of virgin queens will take to the air for their nuptial flight, launching themselves in an impressive and distinctive vertical take-off and hoping to avoid predators in the form of birds or man. Collecting alates (winged queens or, less substantial, drones) for food is common practice in many rural cultures. Many ant species and also termites produce alates, and their appearance will cause much excitement as a feast is in store. The Black Garden Ant is the most accessible to the European forager as it is very common and, clearly, an ant that likes gardens. The trick with eating live ants is to bite them before they bite you. The flavour is a great surprise to anyone who has never eaten an ant before - fruity and complex. The fruit is usually lemon, but sometimes tangerine. No one ever got fat from eating ants; even for their size, they have very little food value.

Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) 
 
As one would expect of the ubiquitous blackberry, it has many local names. These are often inventive and particularly so in this case. In Donegal it was the 'cock-bramble', and Worcestershire has it as 'county lawyers' (probably in reference to the vicious thorns rather than the sweet fruit). I like the evocative Scottish term 'lady garten berries' and the incomprehensible Cumbrian 'bumble kites'. There are twenty more to choose from. Of course, Blackberry is the name of the fruit, the plant itself being the Bramble, from the Middle English brambel. 
 
The Latin name, Rubus fruticosus, was supplied by the great botanist and taxonomist Linnaeus, and everyone was content with that, while noting that brambles are rather variable in form. Botanists are seldom content and have divided what most people would consider to obviously be a bramble into around 350 micro-species, none of which is called Rubus fruticosus. Rubus fruticosus agg. (for 'aggregate') is the name botanists use informally: at dinner parties, for example. Of course, they don't even agree with each other on the taxonomic position of brambles, but will usually say (incomprehensibly) that 'they are any and all members of the subgenus Rubus within the genus Rubus, sub-section Glandulosus'. Should you ever suffer insomnia, Bramble specialists, incidentally, are known as 'batologists.'

Blackberries. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Burdock (Arctium minus)

There is little to love about this notorious despoiler of woolly jumpers and expensive haircuts. The dreaded seed heads are surrounded by hooked spikes which lock on to anything fibrous that is foolish enough to get that close. Incidentally, I learned only recently that to remove them you should break the 'burr' in half and turn it inside out. The most useful culinary part of the plant is the large root. Burdock is a biennial, so the best time to collect it is at the end of its first year and before it starts its second year's growth, when it produces its flowers and seeds. Any later and the root will be very tough. It may still need some serious peeling to remove any fibrous exterior.

Dog Rose (Rosa Canina)

The Dog Rose and Field Rose are the two common wild roses of Britain, although the latter species is restricted to England and Wales, coming to an unusually sudden halt level with Scarborough. The Dog Rose is common throughout most of Britain, but with complex distribution that leaves a few conspicuous holes, such as most of Lincolnshire and much of Yorkshire. Distinguishing between the two species is not of any great importance to the forager. They both produce delicate, mildly scented flowers, and both produce rosehips. Both species sprawl over hedges and wood edges, making a glorious picture in high summer. There is little worth doing with the flowers apart from sprinkling some petals over a salad.

Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) 
 
Restraint is needed should you be lucky enough to encounter a good-sized Chicken of the Woods. The best part by far is the edge of the tiers. The Flesh further in is tough and relatively tasteless. So just take a few slices from the edge and leave the fungus to produce spores and provide someone else with their dinner. The flavour of this highly prized fungus is mild but very good, and the texture is soft and slightly fibrous. Chicken of the Woods receives its name due to the similarity of its flesh to that of chickens, rather than the shape of the bird. It is, then, the perfect meat substitute. One simple recipe that brings out the best in this fungus is in a creamy sauce with rice, or in a pie. If there are any bits of the fungus left over, then they wil dry and powder well.

The splendiferous chicken of the woods. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Giant Puffball (Calvatia gigantea)

Nothing in this book causes more excitement in the heart of the forager than the Giant Puffball. They are pure white , and they are enormous. The remarkable size of these fruiting bodies is compounded by their habit of growing in rings, where it is not uncommon to find twenty specimens.

Giant puffballs have also been known as 'furze-balls', 'Devil's sniff-box', and 'bunt'. They have long been of use, but not so much in the kitchen. It is very important to pick them up when they are very young, as mature specimens are completely inedible and can cause digestive problems. The flesh must be firm and pure white throughout. This can be detected by gently poking one - if it feels like a marshmallow - it will be too old. The skin should be peeled away, the flesh sliced to about 0.8 cm, and then broken into biscuit-sized pieces. These should be fried in butter on one side, taken out, added more buttered, and then fried on the other.

Dog Rose (Rosa Canina) 
 
The Dog Rose and Field Rose are the two common wild roses of Britain, although the latter species is restricted to England and Wales, coming to an unusually sudden halt level with Scarborough. The Dog Rose is common throughout most of Britain, but with complex distribution that leaves a few conspicuous holes, such as most of Lincolnshire and much of Yorkshire. Distinguishing between the two species is not of any great importance to the forager. They both produce delicate, mildly scented flowers, and both produce rosehips. Both species sprawl over hedges and wood edges, making a glorious picture in high summer. There is little worth doing with the flowers apart from sprinkling some petals over a salad.

Dog rose. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Crab Apple (Malus sylvestris) 
 
The Crab Apple has been around since Neolithic times and were a favourite food for a people that had never experienced the joy of eating a Russet. It is recognised by the small size of the fruit, at no more than 3 cm in diameter and yellow or green. The leaves are different too, with the Crab Apple having leaves that are smooth all over, whereas the leaves of the cultivated apple are slightly downy underneath. It is a common tree in England. Apple trees insist on good light and so are found on wood edges, in woodland clearings and internal farm hedgerows. Once you have your collection of Crab Apples, remove any bad ones and keep any that are not to be used in the shed and unwashed. They will survive for months if kept well, and a surprisingly long time even if kept badly. Crab apples are a near-essential ingredient in fruit leather.

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)

Hawthorn is a small but lovely tree, painting the countryside in spring with its frothy white and pink May blossom and in the autumn with its red berries. It is likely to be our commonest tree because of the millions planted during the enclosure periods when private ownership replaced the common, open-field system painfully and slowly. The most imaginative cooks in the world have come up with a few recipes, but they are worth trying.

Apple. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Interaction with nature - naming and seeing and tasting - deepens our knowledge. Rather than a lifestyle overhaul, just simply notice, pay attention, and commune with the space. There are so many more items included in this wonderful botanical compendium; Wright has been a foraging trip leader for decades. Visit more at www.ediblebush.com or www.foragerscalendar.net. And please resist using this essay as permission to go out and eat those berries you always wanted to try. Caution, carefulness, and expertise must come first.