This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
It is a pursuit that probably wouldn’t make it into a Hemingway-style hunting memoir, but for much of my life I’ve been chasing wild garlic. When I was at school — no more than 12 or 13 years old — I’d skip rugby practice in spring to go out into the woods with a couple of bin bags. The wild garlic (Allium ursinum) — known as “ramsons” to some — appeared in the same places every year and, in the time it took my peers to do a bit of scrummaging and a few line-out practices, I could very easily fill those black plastic bags.
I’d return to the boarding house in the late afternoon and wash my haul before chopping it up with craft scissors. I’d then take all the butter from the fridge (usually a full week’s supply) and, using the boarding house kitchen microwave, I’d set about making wild garlic butter.
There were, on reflection, two or perhaps three boys who were pleased with my culinary efforts but, perhaps fairly, the whole process won me limited favour amongst my peers more generally. I guess that wild garlic butter isn’t universally popular amongst the young.
My fairly frequent spring absences from the rugby field were a cause of great annoyance to the coach who would often appear at the boarding house after practice insisting that he and I go to see my housemaster so I could explain myself. Some years later, the coach ended up serving a lengthy prison sentence for crimes far greater than my foraging, which also saw him struck off the teachers’ register whilst being ordered to sign his name on that other register. Wild garlic quite possibly kept me out of harm’s way.
Last Sunday, Constance and I went for a wander in the dell up behind the village with a couple of wicker baskets. It’s a very popular spot for picking wild garlic and in late March it often seems like half the village is at it. Ducks are starting to pair up, it won’t be long until the roe does are having their fawns and the scent of all that wild garlic drifts on the early spring breeze.
Ursinum is the Latin for “of a bear”. Wild garlic is also known as “bear garlic” because of the old belief that brown bears, which became extinct in Britain in around 500 AD, would eat it after awakening from hibernation to give them strength. The Celts believed that eating wild garlic purified the blood, and they used it too as a poultice for wounds. In some parts of Europe it was fed to cattle as their milk then tasted garlicky, which was prized for cheesemaking.
In a number of admittedly limited ways I have progressed over the past 20 years, and now, rather than making wild garlic butter, I like to make wild garlic scones. Late March is a perfect moment in that it’s still cold enough to warrant lighting the fire indoors. Garlic scones with a small glass of beer by an open fire is one of rural life’s greatest pleasures.
Some months ago, I met the former chief executive of the Surrey Wildlife Trust. She was compering at a book festival where I was talking about my book, Uncommon Ground. She told me that foraging was generally prohibited across the Trust’s 17,300 acres. It’s perfectly possible that, if fungi picking was allowed, it would cause a complete denuding of the likes of chanterelles or giant puffballs but all the same I was sorry to hear about the prohibition.
There are few ways to connect with the land more positively than by harvesting its fruits. At the heart of it, it’s very simple — foraging is a process that makes it clear to the forager that the land is generative. Look after the woods, and they will continue to give. Don’t look after them and soon there will be nothing much left. The double tragedy of the Surrey Wildlife Trust’s land being no-go for would-be wild garlic pickers is that space to truly engage with the countryside matters even more on London’s doorstep.
I imagine the ancient Celts would think the idea that nature is simply something to be looked at rather than engaged with and eaten is complete madness.
