Cities and Towns Cities and Towns

With its asphalt and concrete makeup, a town resembles a rocky landscape, though parks, gardens and abandoned fields add their patches of green. Many of those green spaces are manicured and carefully tended, which means you won't find many edible plants there. Instead, seek out spots where nature has been left to its own devices, especially those further from urban centers. Use caution when foraging along major roads or near factories where there is a risk of pollution, and avoid places where herbicides are sprayed.

The vegetation in rocky landscapes is especially interesting around creeks and rivers, where water and sunlight combine to create optimal conditions for life to flourish. The same holds for a city’s harbor, which often makes for very good foraging. Lining the docks, scattered among rocks, and interspersed along gravel are many interesting varieties of seaside plants, including broadleaf pepperweed, sea beets, rosehips, and sea buckthorn. But harbors aren’t the only part of a town that hold pockets of nature. For foraging purposes, it can be helpful to think of urban areas like a dart board, with the city center as the bullseye, and the other zones ringing it. The center may seem barren, but the further out you go, the more vegetation increases.

Zone 1: Town center

In the center of a town or city, buildings block the sunlight and asphalt covers the earth. The obstructions can make it challenging to forage, but it’s not impossible. Along the rim of parking lots, beech hedging yields young leaves, while garlic mustard grows along the edge of playgrounds. And, even in the very center of the city, parks sometimes hide ramson, wild apples, and wild strawberries.

Zone 2: Urban residential areas

If the very center of a city seems as barren as a craggy mountain peak, the residential areas immediately around it are, when it comes to vegetation, like the initial slopes around it. The green spaces around apartment buildings may not yield a huge bounty, but they do contain mugwort, stinging nettles, and chickweed, as well as some fruit trees.

Zone 3: Suburban areas

Further from the center, suburban streets and the green spaces around public buildings and facilities offer more prospects. Park trails, soccer fields, roadside ditches and even the hedges that border private yards are home to herbs like garlic mustard, white dead nettles, ground elder, red clover, and horseradish, as well as blackberry bushes and wild cherry and elderflower trees.

Zone 4: Rural areas

As the urban shifts to rural, structures thin out and nature reasserts itself, sometimes in neglected-looking areas that resemble grasslands or hedges. The land around vacant buildings frequently harbors herbs that thrive in bare soil, like hairy bittercress, garlic mustard, and shepherd's purse, while more overgrown areas can contain berry bushes and fruit and nut trees.

Buildings retain the sun's heat, which is why average temperatures in urban areas are higher than those in rural ones. For the same reason, the gathering season in town starts earlier and ends later than in the countryside.

Spring

Herbs come into leaf in spring. In parks and areas with topsoil and trees, the first bulbous plants—such as ramson and sand leek—sprout, as does wood sorrel, which can be picked year round. Ground elder, red dead nettle, and garlic mustard shoot up in playgrounds and home gardens. You can pick spruce shoots and young leaves from trees in city parks, which come into leaf at the end of April. On lawns you'll find common sorrel, daisies, and dandelions. Seaside plants will pop up around harbors and you can gather seaweed along clean coastal areas.

Summer

Summer is the season for edible flowers—elderflower and sorrel grow among park bushes and along leafy bicycle paths, as do roses and rosehips. Horseradish pops up along roads and near lawns and playing fields. The fruit of the wild cherry trees that line many roads ripens in mid-summer. At about the same time, chicory sprouts on the outskirts of town, and aquatic herbs take root along the edge of lakes, rivers, and seas. In late summer many spring herbs become too woody and bitter to eat, but stinging nettles and other leafy greens will shoot up again if they're regularly mowed.

Late summer, fall, and winter

Blackberries and rowan berries ripen in late summer, while wild apples and pears—the autumn’s primary urban ‘crop’—take until September. That same month, mugwort blooms in areas with dry, sandy soil like vacant building lots and road shoulders. In September and October, mushrooms spring up in wooded areas and parks where dead branches and leaves are have been left to decompose. Sea buckthorn and rosehips bear fruit along unpaved stretches of shoreline. Sheep’s sorrel and garlic mustard persevere through a mild winter, while hairy bittercress will survive even a severe winter.