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Even under the current movement restrictions – you can find something wild, edible and free within walking distance of your front door. There are wild edibles to be found in the British countryside year-round, but from early March onwards anyone who calls themselves a forager really has no excuse for NOT being out and hunting down that young growth.
then I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve really been missing out.
People tend to think of ‘the foraging season’ as being from August to October, with the abundance of fruit and fungi that can be found across the UK at that time of year. For me this is the time for action – the wild food harvest has begun. So the phrase “ Ne’er cast a clout ’til May is out” would probably translate into standard modern English as: “ Don’t put away your clothes until the flowers of the Hawthorn bush are out“.Īs we head out of a pretty cold and dismal winter it is heartening to see the young buds of spring appearing in the hedgerows and woodlands. As the month of May is roughly when the warmer weather of early summer arrives for the northern hemisphere then there is probably some parallel thinking going on – if a flower first appears when the cold weather ends then you might as well name it for the month when that happens. There are plenty of other species out there than share the word ‘ May‘ somewhere in their common name, and all of these probably take their name from the name for the month – even if the origins of that name itself are under some dispute. The flowers will show as tightly-closed green buds from March onwards, but will only open and show themselves fully when the last of the cold weather and overnight frosts have finished and the warmer weather of late spring and early summer has truly arrived. The clusters of delicate white flowers are very often referred to as ‘ May‘ or ‘ May Flower‘ though, and this is most probably the root of the “ May” in the phrase above. Hawthorn is just one of the common names for Crataegus monogyna – others are ‘ White-May‘, ‘ Whitethorn‘, ‘ Thorn-Bush‘, ‘ Mother-Die‘ and at least a dozen more. the fifth month of the Gregorian (modern) calendar, but this is probably an over simplification. Some would take it to mean the month of May, i.e. The ‘clout’ referred to is an old English word for clothing (clout = cloth, roughly), but the meaning of ‘May’ is under a little more debate. The phrase “ ne’er cast a clout til May is out” (sometimes “ Cast ne’er a clout til May is out“) probably arose sometime in 1500s, but may be a lot older. It is a key species in the British landscape and one that is accessible for both rural and urban-dweller alike. Indeed, the name ‘Haw’(thorn) comes from their word ‘haeg’ or ‘gehaeg’, which is given as being the name for either the enclosure near a dwelling or the trees that marked the boundary around it.
They usually make up anywhere from 40 to 70% of hedgerow species, and isolated Hawthorn trees are listed as Anglo-Saxon boundary markers. Hawthorn shrubs are unmissable in the British countryside. I also uttered, in a poor approximation of 16thC English: Yesterday I was running a foraging course over at Rhug Estate and spent a good deal of time poking at one of the semi-ancient hawthorns there, waxing lyrical about the easily-acquired subtle flavours of the leaves and long ethnobotanical associations between this species and pre-Christian European civilisation. There’s a blurry phone photo of it next to this paragraph – the freshly-opened blossom of Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna. The morning dog walk around the back field revealed a new arrival that, for some, heralds the arrival of warmer weather. A strong easterly wind, no rain and evening frosts has slowed the arrival of spring growth this year, and I spend some time each morning staring at 150 oak saplings, wondering if they will ever start to show signs of budding. We’re experiencing the first day of heavy rain that we’ve seen in North East Wales for over 6 weeks, and although it’s probably a day for hiding indoors – I’m not unhappy to see the return of some much-needed moisture. As I write this the wind is hurling bucketfuls of rain at the office window, and I can see cherry blossom blow past as it is ripped from the trees in the orchard.
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