It’s illegal to forage in Golden Gate Park, or any city park. Still, as I learned on a recent “Wild Plants & Medicinals Walk,” courtesy of ForageSF, you could create a lot of tasty meals and treat many ailments with things both wild and cultivated growing in the park. Our guide for the walk was Erin McKinsey, a scientist at Traditional Medicinals tea company. She said she regularly makes salads and pestos from what are generally considered weeds. (Most of those weeds, she admitted, come from her own yard.)
The walk is well worth doing so I don’t want to give it all away. But here are some highlights from our afternoon.
We spent the bulk of the class in a little area just east of Kezar Stadium, where a blocked-off spur of Argeullo Blvd is edged by a long strip filled with a jumble of plants. “This area might not look like much but it has tons and tons of edible and useful plants,” she said. “It’s like a little slice of heaven to me.”
That’s largely due to the efforts of Greg Gar, a volunteer who operates a nursery for San Francisco native plants in the nearby Golden Gate Park Community Garden and has tended that slice of heaven for decades. He was out weeding that afternoon and tagged along for part of the walk, offering commentary.
McKinsey moved carefully through the bed, plucking off leaves as she described the plant’s properties. Any leaves she pulled off. she carefully placed back on the ground before moving onto the next plant.
There was miner’s lettuce, which tastes like spinach and its frequent companion plant, chickweed, another delicious wild green with tiny leaves and white flowers. There was mugwort, which has “psycho-spiritual” associations, including inducing lucid dreaming; cow parsnip, a green that tastes like celery if you peel the skin off and that can be stir fried; Jerusalem sage, whose broad green leaves are delicious when fried with butter; and hummingbird sage, which has a sweet almost strawberry smell and like all mints, according to McKinsey, contains a compound that has been found to enhance memory. (As with so many of these medicinal plants, modern medicine seems to be catching up to what indigenous healers have long known.)
She showed us figwort, which is a “lymphatic mover” (I’m still not quite sure what that means) and that can be made into a poultice good for skin wounds. Someone asked if it was edible. “I don’t hear of anyone eating it,” McKinsey said and popped a leaf in her mouth. “Because it doesn’t taste good.”
Figwort, Gar added, is also a host for the larvae of the variable checkerspot butterfly. “Without it, the butterfly would probably disappear.”
She stopped by a patch of yarrow and ran her fingers over the feathery leaves. The plant reputedly has analgesic powers and stops bleeding. Its Latin name is Achillea milleforium, for the Greek warrior Achilles, who supposedly covered his whole body with a poultice of yarrow before going into battle to prevent himself from bleeding. But he missed his heel; hence that infamous spot of vulnerability.
“This is Oregon grape,” she said, bending over a low-to-the-ground plant with red-green leaves that looked a bit like holly. “The new leaves taste lemony and are pretty delicious. As they get older they’re more leathery. Everything’s going to be tastier when it’s young.”
Oregon grape is also “really useful,” she said. It contains a compound, berberine, that is a digestive stimulant, supports liver health and acts as a strong antibiotic. “I’d use it for anything I need an antibiotic for — like UTIs.”
In the nearby Kezar triangle meadow, she pulled up a fuzzy specimen of dwarf nettle. Like all nettles it stings, but McKinsey said “I love this plant so much. I don’t mind the sting. It’s probably the most nutrient dense plant on the planet.” Besides making for a tangy pesto — be sure to blanch it first — nettle can be used for allergies, among other ailments.
We walked past a patch of oxalis, exploding with yellow flowers. Oxalis, also known as sour-grass or wood sorrel, is incredibly invasive — the bane of those like Gar fighting to protect native vegetation. “It’s the worst weed in the Bay area,” he grumbled.
“It’s very tasty,” McKinsey countered, noting that the sour, citrusy flavor is a good with fish.
“Eat it all!” he said.
Later we crossed into the park proper, for a quick circuit of the vegetation around Korea Children’s Quarter. McKinsey described the benefits of oaks, willows, horse chestnuts, ceanothus and more. The ever-present eucalyptus trees, she reminded us, contain menthol, useful as an expectorant or analgesic. And of course, the rampant blackberry brambles— another invasive scourge — would soon be ripe with juicy berries.
As we headed out, we passed some people carrying armfuls of greens they’d clearly just harvested in the park.
I asked McKinsey if she knew what they’d gathered. She wasn’t sure. She thought it looked like lambsquarters, a member of the amaranth family which also includes beets, chard, quinoa, and spinach. “I'm not 100 percent sure on that, but it's a really delicious wild green too.”
We think we’re so smart with pharmaceuticals. Ha!
Lovely, great info! I hope to start working some foraged ingredients into my cooking this year :)