Helen Lehndorf’s earliest memory of being alone in nature, was at 4 years old, on a motorbike trip with her dad, near their home in rural Taranaki. Keen to head off with his mates further up a hill, he left her to play in a valley, reassuring her she would always be able to hear the motorbikes in the distance. After a few hours, the sun started moving across the valley floor and the engine sounds disappeared. Alone, apart from a menacing-looking magpie, she clenched her fists and bundled her jacket against the cold, before turning to a familiar friend – a blackberry bush.
Although it ended well (her dad returned shortly after, grateful for the blackberries she had thoughtfully picked for him), I’ll admit to an urbanite like me, reading the opening scene in Lehndorf’s memoir, A Forager’s Life, made my breath shallow and a little panicky, dredging up a memory as a toddler of briefly losing my parents on a crowded beach. Yet, for Lehndorf, it encapsulates something elemental about her life and her memoir: a beautiful story about creativity and belonging, marriage and motherhood, that also speaks to how we lose and return to ourselves over the course of a life, and how our relationship with nature can be a way back in.
Speaking to Canvas from her home in New Plymouth, Lehndorf recalls feeling frightened that day “mostly because of the magpie” but regards it as her most potent early memory of the wilderness being a reassuring place. “There’s the mosaic of family and you’re just a little tile in that mosaic, aren’t you?” she says, “It was my first really intense memory of feeling like an individual person, and that first tangible feeling of the elemental support of nature.”
In a post-pandemic world, growing your own food and living a simpler life, usually rurally, is the new luxury. The hashtag #foragingtiktok has 14 million views and on YouTube there are hundreds of young men and women wandering around in cottage-core outfits picking fruit for the camera. Yet Lehndorf ’s memoir of her wild food beginnings sits well outside of a trend, recounting memories from rural Waitara in the 1960s, of her father hunting for dinner and her mother foraging for mushrooms; the neighbours dropping around surplus crops, and endless cups of community tea. It recalls a way of life we used to honour in New Zealand, before “sustainability” was in vogue, and “community” meant the local Facebook page.
I sense, in the cities at least, that many people’s plant identification skills might stretch as far as the basil you can buy in a pot from Countdown, and I tell Lehndorf I think I have the plant equivalent of prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise familiar faces). Standing in the middle of the native bush behind our house it all just looks, well, green. So where does one begin? She tells me there is a common phrase in nature writing called the “green wall”, where all the plants look the same.
