One of the bits of vegetation I ate for the first time on Anna’s foraging course was a thistle. There is a tendency to force your mind open when you eat a thistle, to prepare yourself for it to taste very different to what you expected, but what it tasted like was a thistle. At best you might have said it had overtones of fibrous, angry cucumber, which didn’t work for me as someone who’s always believed cucumber to be redolent of many of the most disappointing aspects of life as a UK citizen. I preferred my first tastes of wood sorrel, mustard leaf, Anna’s nettle tea – which she said had completely cured her hay fever – and hart’s tongue. Ancient wisdom says that hart’s tongue prevents people from having impure thoughts and, sure enough, I did not have any impure thoughts for a whole three hours after eating it, but that might just have been because I had a headache. We also found some lady’s mantle – also known as alchemilla – in the garden at Sharpham, which, Anna informed us, helps to regulate the female menstrual cycle. I noticed that at this point most of the men in the group hung back slightly from the lady’s mantle, as if concerned by the prospect of having their own cycles regulated. I am sure that I was far from the best student on the course – my decision to wolf down a bag of samosas straight after it had finished would seem to underline this – but I did notice that my ability to see through the green wall – whether I had the intention of eating some of it or not – improved afterwards. A huge teasel growing behind my back fence became no longer just a nondescript weed in the wallpaper of the land but a masterpiece of natural bee-friendly architecture, with leaves that curved to collect rainwater and form organic drinking bowls for blue tits. Strimming an unexplored patch at the far end of my garden and catching a familiar odour, I stopped just in time to rescue a previously undiscovered patch of verbascum and mint then picked a few leaves of the latter and used them to make tea.
I often end up with stuff in my pockets during my local walks: the odd bit of wild food, but also shells, pebbles, a horseshoe, a lichen-coated stick with a fetching accidental sheep’s wool wig. Pockets become different things here to what they are in many other counties. In Devon having a large collection of twigs or a mollusc in your pocket is regarded in pretty much the same way as having some keys in your pocket is in Kent, Berkshire or Leicestershire. I get home and empty mine, finding places in the garden for the knicknacks I’ve discovered. Some of them stay on a permanent basis, often becoming mildly talismanic, and the rest gradually fade into the earth. I can’t help but pick up a long thin piece of seaweed with a bulbous head, noting its resemblance to a zombie snake, and it comes back home with me to live on a low granite wall for a while, guarding my back door until it withers and then one day is no longer there. A tiny bird skull found on a green lane near the village of Blackawton replaces it. In horror films an animal skull in or near a house is one of the early signifiers that you’ve entered the place where the Bad Folks live, but the people I’ve met in Devon who have them near theirs tend to be the opposite: some of the least scary people you can come across. A farmer will often affectionately hang on to the skull of a favourite ram. A friend who has campaigned against the cull keeps the skull of a badger, found beneath some gorse on a walk on the edge of Dartmoor, in her workroom. It is there for the same reason that the stone-floored mid-Norfolk farmhouse of the late artist and robot maker Bruce Lacey, which I visited in 2012, was full of taxidermy: it is a lament. It’s about love.
By late summer 2016 badgers had become a regular, almost casual, presence in my garden. One morning in mid-August I was woken at four by a loud crunching sound directly below my bedroom near the living room’s French windows, where my elderly cat The Bear liked to sleep. I remembered that I’d fed The Bear a chicken thigh earlier and neglected to get rid of the bone. ‘Don’t crunch the bone, The Bear!’ I shouted, then, worrying, went downstairs to remove it. I arrived at the windows to find a small badger, its mouth full and a somewhat sheepish look on its face. The Bear sat calm but wide-eyed, two feet to the badger’s left. I began to leave the leftovers that my cats were too spoilt to eat outside for the badgers in bowls, knowing they would be empty by morning. I watched several times from the window as one of the badgers scuttled to within a foot or so of where one of my other cats, Shipley, sat on an old beanbag, a sorry-looking item long since relegated from the house, which, despite my attempts to patch it up, haemorrhaged polystyrene beads onto my lawn, but, owing to Shipley’s abiding attachment to it, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away. Shipley
