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For as far back as she can remember, Chitral-born herbalist Bilquis Sheikh has reached for herbs and wild plants as the first form of defence. 

“If you have a broken bone and the closest doctor is 12 hours away, turning to the kitchen or using willow tree branches is what you do. Our women are all kitchen doctors,” she explained in an article for the BBC, referencing a popular natural remedy where willow tree bark is ground and mixed with warm mustard oil to help heal inflammation in the area. 

Yet Sheikh’s locus of influence extends far beyond her kitchen, or even her remote hometown close to K2. A registered practitioner of homeopathy, certified alternative medicine practitioner and owner of the formidable herbal medicine and wellness empire, Naturalize, Dr Bilquis has become a household name in Pakistan. She credits the adoration of millions of fans to her indigenous wisdom, passed down from generations of Chitrali women.

Natural remedies are woven into the region’s heritage, she explains. Over 1,400m above sea level, the bowl-shaped valley is tucked between the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains. Its seclusion and remote accessibility meant local community members developed a unique tradition of alternative medicine using foraged herbs. 

The remedies often feature bushy shrubs, wildflowers and unassuming herbs as potent vessels for naturopathic healing, with hard-won expertise through centuries of trial and error. 

“For us, foraging is a way of life. Starting from early childhood, mothers will often send young children out to harvest the herbs of the season,” explains Sheikh, who has fond memories of playing truth or dare with sharp, citrusy sprigs of spearmint. “In Chitral, turning to natural medicine and herbs is still the overwhelming trend.” 

The handling and treatment of the herbs is also important, so the composition isn’t altered, adds Sheikh: “When you forage a herb and bring it home, make sure it’s in a cloth or paper bag – not plastic. Never dry them in harsh, direct sunlight.”  

One of the most popular preparations of herbal treatments in Chitral is through brewing teas – fitting in the frigid cold. Ranging from apple tea for depression, peppermint or thyme tea for digestion and dandelion tea to detoxify the liver and combat bloating, Sheikh seems to have a tea up her sleeve for seemingly every ailment. 

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“For us, foraging is a way of life. Starting from early childhood, mothers will often send young children out to harvest the herbs of the season,” 

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Confronted with these myriad options, one would be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing nature can’t cure, but Sheikh is quick to caution these herbal hacks aren’t a substitute for medical advice: “It’s about trying to stay healthy and prevent illness by listening to the rhythms of nature, not replacing important prescription medication. Prevention is always better than cure.” 

And Chitrali wild plants aren’t only consumed in tea form. Such is the abundance of mushrooms, in fact, that many have turned to foraging and selling them for financial profit in the past decade. “Chitral’s climate and rainy season is perfect for mushrooms. The joy that you get when you find a special mushroom is indescribable,” says Sheikh. “Rivalled only by the elusive saffron flower. Coming across that is like finding gold.” 

After many harsh winter months, spring, specifically, is a time for new beauty regimens galore. 

“Spring in Chitral is generally short-lived,” says Sheikh, “And may come late. In my village, for example, spring is in June and July. But there’s over 50 varieties of flowers and the entire valley smells absolutely heavenly.” For the Chitrali women, the blooms become rich fodder for simple yet effective beauty remedies. 

“Sea buckthorn, for example, is nature’s skin surgeon,” she says. “We make a green tea with the leaves, and when the berries ripen to a glistening orange, we crush them to make a lip mask. Later, we use the mulch as fertiliser for next year’s harvest.” 

Roses, too are used in various forms, says Sheikh, who has formulated a rose petal tea for urinary tract infections. When the colourful roses fade and fall to the ground, it’s time to collect the rosehips, she explains. Instead of consuming them in a concentrated supplement form, women in Chitral crush the rosehips in a mortar and pestle then brew a strong tea, “to increase our natural beauty,” she smiles. Perfumes, too, are best found in nature for Sheikh. “The scent of Russian olives is better than any perfume on Earth,” she adds. 

Essentially, explains Sheikh, the central principle of the Chitrali approach to wild foods and medicines rests on appreciating what’s in season and understanding there must be a rationale behind Mother Nature’s calendar. 

Crucially, she says, sustainable foraging requires always being mindful of leaving enough behind for the seasons to come, a value she hopes is not lost as foraging comes into vogue worldwide. “We’ve learned through centuries that we need to take only a little bit at a time,” she says. “Don’t take the plant out from the roots because then, after a few years, the entire population will dwindle, and the ecosystem will suffer. Use flowers and leaves instead of the roots. Don’t over forage from one area specifically. Think of it as a continuous, virtuous cycle.”

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Peppered with huge swathes of feathery amaranth, breadfruit and trees bedazzled with exotic guava and mangoes, Hawai’i has much more to offer than the perfect surfing wave. Known for their lush landscapes and scenic beaches, the Hawaiian Islands are teeming with biodiversity and rich tropical ecosystems – a forager’s paradise. 

But they weren’t always like this. 

“It’s quite a fragile ecosystem,” says relational artist Gaye Chan, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, “Hawai’i is the most isolated place in the world. Before human arrival, it is arguable whether there was sufficient food source to sustain human life.”

The great majority of plants in Hawai’i are introduced. It wasn’t until Polynesian voyagers brought ‘canoe plants’ to the islands between 1000 and 1200 AD for food and medicine that the geographically secluded archipelago in the heart of the Pacific Ocean began sustaining broader forms of life, she explains. 

The great majority of plants in Hawai’i are introduced. It wasn’t until Polynesian voyagers brought ‘canoe plants’ to the islands between 1000 and 1200 AD for food and medicine that the geographically secluded archipelago in the heart of the Pacific Ocean began sustaining broader forms of life, she explains. 

 In the strictest sense of the word, the canoe plants are non-native species, often called ‘Polynesian introductions’. 

The colonists, along with each group of indentured labourers and immigrants, continue to bring and add plant varieties to the ecosystem.

To Chan, who views relationships and concepts as the medium through which she creates her art, this nuanced evolution raises questions of when, why and how some species are classified as native, non-native, or invasive. In particular, she considers how the process of categorisation works in the popular imagination in relation to ideas of belonging.

“Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? What and who has to be eradicated?” she asks. Chan believes the predominant discourse of eliminating lifeforms designated ‘invasive’ is, “genocidal rhetoric and emblematic of a xenophobic world view.” While many would regard this as an admittedly extreme view reserved for the destruction of a group of people, the practice of mass eradication of lifeforms such as goats, pigs, or guavas is common in Hawai’i. A form of violence that is taught in elementary school and to community volunteer groups is pono. These questions led Chan to her ongoing project WE(ED)S, a provocation.  

The politics of foraging 

Weeds – plants that grow wild and strong but aren’t valued for their nutrition or beauty – can be a sustainable and free alternative to conventional produce, says Chan.

The idea of weeds, she says, “is driven by political ideologies about belonging. Whether at a golf course, commercial farm, or spaces claimed by ‘nations,’ weeds are plants labelled as interlopers, ones we are taught to disdain…. then eradicate.” 

Since 2015, Chan has led her project, WE(ED)S, where she publishes weed identification guides, hosts cooking demonstrations and shares information in person and online. 

While learning how to cook with weeds is a huge part of the process, that appreciation extends far beyond eating them. The movement Chan is leading chimes with deeper philosophical principles – and has more in common with the UK than one might think. 

EATING IN PUBLIC (EIP) which Chan co-founded in 2003 with her partner Nandita Sharma, Professor of Racism, Migration and Transnationalism in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, is a movement based on subverting capitalism through art and education. 

It draws inspiration from The Diggers – 17th century agrarian commoners in England who planted edible food as an act of protest against the expropriation of their commons by the burgeoning nation-state and capitalist system, Chan explains. 

When the once self-sustaining people had their common lands taken away from them, their act of defiance was an anti-capitalist revolt. As Sharma has explained in a video, “Knowing how to eat weeds is a way for us to reclaim our freedom from capitalists.” 

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“When we plant papayas, we aren’t continuing the work of the diggers, we are the diggers. We’re still fighting against the system. Continuing the work of reclaiming the commons.” 

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Today, EIP’s many projects help position foraging as an effective way to combat food insecurity and live a lifestyle less reliant on capitalist structures. EIP plants papaya trees, makes anarchist recycling bins, runs free stores and encourages seed sharing – in packets made from a delightful zero-waste method of cutting junk mail envelopes and filling them with excess seeds.

Unlike Santa, EIP is a system that equally favours the naughty and the nice. In effect, Chan says: “When we plant papayas, we aren’t continuing the work of the diggers, we are the diggers. We’re still fighting against the system. Continuing the work of reclaiming the commons.” 

EIP also arranges Diggers Dinners, described as exercises in radical sharing, both of food and ideas. Along with training in self-sufficiency skills, including sharpening knives, making chopsticks, cleaning fish and pickling kimchi, the culminating open-to-the-public potluck dinner invited everyone to come and share the backstory of their contribution, particularly how they had, “grown, hunted, fished, foraged, bartered, gleaned, gifted – or stolen – the primary ingredient/s.”

Foraging against hegemonic ideals

Chan’s journey into foraging began out of irritation and curiosity.

“Our home was a space that was over-cared for. Previous owners were using a lot of pesticides and herbicides. It didn’t have any bees or butterflies or worms, so whatever I grew was attacked by aphids. It wasn’t a healthy environment,” she explains. 

Her frustration with conventional gardening practices led her to reconsider what a garden should be. “I had these hegemonic ideas of what a good garden is – I’d pull out the things I thought were not supposed to be there,” Chan says.  But this perspective shifted dramatically when she discovered that many of these weeds were not only edible, but delicious.

When Chan and Sharma encountered tart, lemony purslane – one of the most abundant weeds on the island – in their salad at a restaurant, they were hooked. 

“I said, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’ because it was already in our yard. This is the stuff I’d been pulling out,” says Chan. It turned out the chef’s mother was visiting from France and had harvested the overlooked herb near a bus stop because she recognised it as a delicacy. Beyond the unexpected burst of flavour, Chan was captivated by the idea that an oft-overlooked weed could fit so beautifully, both in her salad bowl and her wider belief system.

The concept of foraging extends beyond mere survival; it encompasses a broader philosophy of living harmoniously with the environment. Chan emphasises the importance of understanding and respecting the ecosystems we inhabit. “When you have a hegemonic worldview, you see this kind of ideal picture. Whatever doesn’t match, you either don’t see, or see it as not good.”

This realisation prompted her to take foraging classes with ethnobotanist Nat Bletter of Natty by Nature to learn about the plants already present in her environment and how to incorporate them into her diet. Today, she estimates a third of the vegetables she consumes are foraged weeds, depending on the season. 

“I’m not that exotic forager going into the forest,” she smiles, “I’m the quotidian forager looking where I am.” In fact, she recommends this permaculture approach to connect with what is growing and in season, “You know what’s going on. You know what happens there.”

Now, she’s the one using purslane to make delicious, steamed purslane salad – along with myriad other nutritious dishes. Community members around her also prepare amaranth dinners to help merchant sailors docking in Hawai’i up their fibre intake. “Foragers perform a bit of a vital function in dealing with overabundance,” she says, “A lot of plants thrive in recently disturbed soils, like the sides of highways. They are remediation plants, and if you don’t harvest them, they will make so much more.” 

In many ways, her Robin-hood like system outside of rigid structures is a journey of redistribution and reclamation of the commons. So, is the approach to foraging she advocates an anarchist free-for-all where public/private ownership ceases to exist completely? 

Not quite. 

As Chan says: “In the commons I’d like to work towards and live in, there’s respect for human labour. Not total chaos. Instead of foraging someone else’s rose bush – that would be rude – it’s a world of mutuality and respect that includes all other life forms.”

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For San Francisco Bay-area based Maria Finn, there are 72 seasons, not four. Instead of Summers moulting uneventfully into Autumn or Springs quietly blooming from Winter in a stark, one-off calendar event – she celebrates the appearance of each wild food in California as a distinct shade or season of its own.

 When temperatures begin warming in late January, for instance, she celebrates the lingering mushroom season, incoming miner’s lettuce and budding pine tips. Next, there’s seaweed and cherry blossoms, followed by sprays of creamy elderflower erupting along busy interstate highways – where she sometimes swerves precariously to stop and have a quick forage. When temperatures warm further in June and San Francisco’s summer fog thickens, it’s time for ripened, succulent currants. 

“The convergence of [traditional] seasons is the richest time if you’re out looking at wild foods,” she says. 

Finn’s approach to overlapping seasons resonates with the permaculture design principle known as the edge effect – an ecological principle describing how there is greater diversity in two adjacent ecosystems – the edge of land and water in the wetlands, for instance. Or, in this case, the confluence of conventional seasons.

Nowhere is this all-encompassing fluidity as evident as it is in San Francisco. 

“The wonderfulness of San Francisco is that it’s so international and cosmopolitan in the plants and the trees,” says Finn, who is the founder of The Institute for Ecosystem Based Living, Flora & Fungi Wild Food Adventures and author of Forage. Gather. Feast. 

The city’s eclectic mix of urban and natural environments offers a “full menu”, she explains. From Dungeness crabs at Baker Beach and a wide variety of fish in ocean or bay waters from the city’s public piers – though there are important fishing regulations, she cautions – the smorgasbord of coastal foraged delicacies adds to the strait’s allure. Over in the parks and urban areas, mushrooms sprouting from the pavement, miner’s lettuce, borage, fennel and chickweed are ubiquitous. 

And while legislation crowning the gigantic golden chanterelle as California’s official mushroom is relatively recent, the state has long enjoyed a tradition of rich foraged treats such as mallow, thistle, wild radish, red clover and wild yarrow, with fir and pine tips a particular favourite. 

Golden Gate Park specifically is testimony to the constant reinvention of the cityscape and nature’s resilience. As Finn writes for her upcoming urban foraging guided tour The Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park: “The story of Golden Gate Park is one of trees and romantic ideals. Of believing that nature improves the spirits and character of people trapped in urban squalor. And so two million trees later the windswept dunes of San Francisco’s Outerlands became Golden Gate Park.”

Those two million trees have rich back stories as multifaceted as the city’s inhabitants themselves. “Along with native redwoods, there are peri-peri berries from New Zealand, Japanese maples and cherry teas, native elderflowers, rose geraniums gone wild, currant bushes, blackberries… Everyone comes to the city and brings the landscape they left and know,” she says.

Finn’s own foraging journey, too, has a cosmopolitan origin story. While she has fond memories of a mulberry tree in her backyard growing up, her love for foraging burst into technicolour during her time with Indigenous communities in the Yukon territories, where she spent roughly nine years (though she travelled back for winters). “In Alaska, it’s not called foraging. It’s subsistence. It was about relationships.” 

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“Keep it simple. Keep it local,” she says. Her vision is clear: to transform our world by learning from nature’s regenerative systems.

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The interconnected way of living with the cadences of nature stayed with Finn, even as she moved to New York and later, to a houseboat in California. She recalls seeing grape leaves harvested in Central Park for dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) and discovering that one’s backyard can be a veritable edible garden during the pandemic.

Finn’s experiences — from picking morels in the Sierra foothills to learning about indigenous food practices in the Yukon — highlight the critical role of the environment in sustaining communities. 

Today, she leads foraging workshops to teach participants how to identify plants, understand their uses, and prepare them thoughtfully in delightfully simple and, most importantly, delicious recipes.

“Keep it simple. Keep it local,” she says. Her vision is clear: to transform our world by learning from nature’s regenerative systems. Through her Institute for Ecosystem-Based Living and numerous speaking engagements, she teaches that foraging is more than a lifestyle – it’s a way of cultivating numerous relationships with the environment, our food, and our communities. 

Embracing this ethos means we can begin to reshape our urban landscapes to reflect the brilliance of nature, fostering sustainability and resilience for future generations, she explains.

The goal Finn advocates for is not to live by foraging off the land entirely – doing so would require far too many acres per person – but to integrate the wisdom of nature into our food systems.

By foraging, we can develop a relationship with our environment, learning what’s in season and how to harvest sustainably, she explains. The practice enriches our diets and deepens our connection to the natural world, reminding us of our place within it.

That place, Finn says, is for humans to be a keystone species – organisms that help hold a system together – rather than damaging it. Through mimicking self-generating and healthy systems, such as the carbon-sequestering properties of seaweed, humans can achieve this status.

“It’s about looking at the brilliant systems in nature and saying: how can we make our world look more like that?” she says.

Understanding the local flora and fungi is also economically beneficial, she explains.

In the heart of northern California, the Napa River flows through tanneries, farms, and wineries, occasionally flooding its winter floodplain — a vital gathering spot for both people and wildlife. This river, threatened by sewage pollution, fish deaths and increased pressure by the growing population, was resuscitated through environmental initiatives such as wetland restoration projects and fish-friendly farming practices.

While these initiatives epitomised the region’s commitment to fish-friendly wine growing and biodiversity conservation, they also underscored lucrative bottom-line benefits. Now, Finn explains, the Napa River is living testament to the balance between nature and human industry, with hotels and tasting rooms now complementing the revitalised ecosystem and thriving business environment.

By adopting an inclusive and multi-faceted approach, foraging – and the many benefits that come with it – help maintain California as the forager’s paradise that it is. 

Still, instead of viewing foraging as a means to ambitious environmental ends alone, Finn recommends foraging for the personal connection it fosters with the environment, and the memories created along the way: “Treat the foraged ingredient like a little accent,” she suggests. 

Everything else will fall into place. No matter the season. 

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