Where the wild things are

Brendan Hoare, organic horticulture expert in the horticultural sanctuary at Unitec. Photo / Dean Purcell

As someone accustomed to seeing his veges displayed in orderly rows within supermarkets, a muddy verge and some scraggly weeds was never likely to inspire a chorus of Food, Glorious Food.

I would have trampled them if my guide hadn't bounded up with a gleeful: "Would you look at those ..." Even at a second glance they still looked like miscellaneous weeds; most likely inedible and useful only in the improved visual amenity their removal would bring. "Nah mate, this is great stuff ... go on try some. Plantain leaves, really good for you."

Well, I'd asked Brendan Hoare to be my trusted guide on this foraging expedition, so try them I did ... pah, grass. I might have questioned the former Unitec lecturer's tastebuds, but after 27 years of organically meddling with plants and travelling the world to address fellow meddlers, he knows his greens. "It's a medicinal herb, loads of vitamin B," adds Hoare, ignoring my gagging. "It's a bit old, so it'll be bitter but that taste is where the value is. That's what all our vegetables tasted like before we blanded it out of them."

Not only did this patch of dirt beneath a shade tree in the middle of Auckland City boast plantain, but also an endive and some milkweed. If neither looked all that yummy, at least endive leaves can be used in salad.

As for milkweed, I'm told the root can be brewed into a tea with reputed diuretic, laxative and expectorant properties while the sap has been used to treat warts, moles and ringworm. This tiny haul was a gift from the birds that perch in the branches and excrete seeds onto the ground below, where - if they're lucky - they will be spared from lawnmowers by the tree's chunky roots.

So, without thinking too hard about the heavy metals these have been feeding on courtesy of the passing traffic, it seemed to be a surprisingly bright start to our quest for wild food in the big smoke. And we'd only just got out of the car. Now the more cynical may prefer to call this scrounging, but the old notion of foraging is coming back into vogue.

Regardless of whether enthusiasts are being driven by recessional necessity or a green conscience, foraging is about stopping the waste of tonnes of unwanted free food growing in parks, reserves and backyards. Informal groups have begun collecting and sharing the locations of useful trees or bushes so everyone can get their fill. What you find depends on the season, of course, and admittedly right now is not particularly fruitful.

All the same we're still hopeful of uncovering something edible during our forage in what must be one of God's Own's more unnatural environments, Auckland's CBD. What became obvious was that the most likely spots are also the least attractive - the ugly, neglected pockets of land where, left alone, nature begins the long process of reverting back to forest.

In contrast, the pretty bits, the parks and gardens, are run according to a pastoral aesthetic that says nature is a beast to be tamed. Myers Park, off Queen St, has plenty of lovely trees and large chunks of recently mown grass. But as a food resource, it's sterile. "Rough pickings here," says Hoare, "and it doesn't matter how it's trimmed and preened, to my eyes it's dead. The grass has been mowed so hard it's like slick cardboard, any rainwater goes straight down the drain. You can see tyre tracks from where they've mowed mud, but they keep on mowing it just the same." It takes a lot of ratepayer cash to keep areas like this landscaped.

In Auckland City the annual cost of maintaining our street and park scapes runs to $3.9 million, Waitakere City spends just over $1.6 million and Manukau City $4.3 million. Unfortunately, North Shore City Council was unable to put a price tag on its efforts, so interested residents may wish to ask it themselves.

Back in Myers Park, we did manage to identify kawakawa, good traditional medicine for stomach upsets, but it was clear that the council contractors were doing a fine job of repressing the plants we were after, so more salubrious surrounds seemed a better option. What's amazing is how many there are when you start to look. Take the corner of Mayoral Dr and Greys Ave.

On a raised ledge next to the footpath are what looks like random plants, but to Hoare the spot is beautiful. Here we find yarrow, a herb that can also be used both in salad and as a tea and fennel, another herb that can be eaten raw and has a liquorice flavour. "Places like this are a powerhouse of growth, lots of flowers, awesome honey providers, and look ... more plantain.

Imagine, if we let this run a little wilder. I think of it as the pacifist approach to horticulture: how can you hate a plant? With more of the right flowers we could even have inner-city honey ... Taiwan did it, they let the weeds and wildflowers prosper, and now they've got rare and endangered birds nesting in their cities." It's an approach he has bought to life at Sanctuary, a semi-chaotic organic garden flourishing in the backblocks of Unitec in Mt Albert. He has little time for Department of Conservation and regional council attempts at weed control, a costly and futile effort according to Hoare.

Given the chance, he'd not only end those programmes, he'd also take the combined mowing budgets of our councils and put it into organic community gardens. In another neglected plot next to the Rendezvous Hotel on Mayoral Dr, we spot some grizzled old puha - probably our best-known traditional vegetable next to kumara - more plantain, dock, and medicinal wireweed.

Across the road is the driveway leading to the back of the Auckland City Council building, and we find an aromatic forest of rosemary, along with more puha. But our best pickings come from a scrappy piece of wasteland next to a carpark on the corner of Mayoral Dr and Cook St. Here we find aloe vera - great for treating burns - wild carrot, blackberry, a fruit salad plant, surprisingly tasty chickweed, pungent dandelion, and deadly nightshade, which despite its name has certain medicinal properties. There are also quite a number of oak saplings which, if left alone, will grow to produce acorns which can be used in pancakes or bread.

Okay, so we couldn't fill a larder with our haul, but we could definitely whip up an interesting salad with a side order of medicines, and all from tiny pockets of green within an urban area no bigger than several football fields. It seems food really is everywhere. But it's still nowhere near common enough for Vidyapati Dasa, a mild-mannered Hare Krishna follower who is quietly promoting his own online revolution. He's president/member/officer of various deep green eco-groups, but it's his Google map which has the most promise of getting his message past the usual believers.

Accessed via the Facebook page of the Auckland Underground Fruit Economy, the map highlights and provides directions to accessible food resources all over the country. Since July, he has been inviting people to add their own entries to their catalogue, which at last count boasted almost 60 sources of free food ranging from bayleaf bushes through to figs, olive, mandarin and plum trees. Dasa is hoping to add a new listing after he checks out a report of wild-growing Jerusalem artichoke.

As some of these listings are found on private property, keen foragers are given careful instructions on how to go about introducing themselves to the owners who, in some cases, see the fruit as garden ornaments - annoying ones when they fall. While it has been about nine years since Dasa foraged his first persimmon tree, he says the push to get organised came from an American friend who sent him news clippings of similar operations there - a practice sometimes referred to as "abundancy gathering".

While interest in his map has been steady since its launch, he says a recent burst of hits suggests word of mouth may be spreading. The only downside is that the fruit season has passed and visitors may not stick around until they return again next year. But he intends to persevere as the notion of inner-city food fits in well with Hare Krishna philosophy, promoting sociability and equity, and changing people's perceptions of where they live. "If your social environment is also your garden, then hopefully people will get inspired to look after it a lot better." His dream is for Auckland to follow the Indian model, where fruit trees are scattered along major pathways to allow people to pause for a refreshing bite on their way to work just as they would at a dairy.

Of course such an idea would win few votes among greengrocers and commercial gardeners, and he accepts that is an issue that would need addressing. THERE ARE other aspects to foraging aside from fruit and veges. The most popular form is bin diving, the rather unsavoury practice of rummaging about in dumpsters for useable food. Then there are those such as Dasa's colleague, Yadu Raya, who is something of a compost forager. His life is closely tied to their communal garden in Onehunga and every three months he devotes three days to collecting everything from grass clippings and straw to manure and seaweed. Decent storms will usually wash up enough to warrant a visit to the beach, while strong westerly winds will dump rich pickings along the west coast and vice versa for easterlies.

So Raya is a little troubled by the proposal to allow the commercial harvesting of seaweed growing below the waterline, especially as compost foraging seems to be becoming more popular. "I'm seeing more and more people out doing the same thing as I am now," he says, "so I think more people are cottoning on to the idea of gardening organically." It's also no longer a surprise to find others at his favourite manure mountain. "That's really good to see.

Just like with foraging for fruit or whatever, it's about sustainability, but it does take a fair bit of commitment." And as with Dasa's fruit trees, there seem to be plenty of people willing to offer their own waste. Raya's garden does very well out of the clippings provided by neighbours and a handful of lawnmowing contractors. Hoare has his own term for what is happening - hortecology, meaning a plant rather than animal-based ecosystem.

Achieving such a state is all about shifting historic approaches toward our living spaces, accepting and appreciating wildness, and dropping the belief that native is always best. Just as a former student of his is now exporting privet flowers, the bane of any hayfever sufferer, Hoare would encourage any move toward foraging as a means toward that end. "Abundance creates abundance and diversity creates diversity," he says. "We spend millions of dollars every year trying to get rid of plants, potentially useful plants, as we found in the city.

"If we eased off a bit we wouldn't just save a huge pile of cash, I think everyone would also be surprised at how it would change their lives. Wouldn't it be fantastic if the biggest inner-city noise problem was being woken up by tuis?"