So, who is mirabelle? And what does she have to do with the agave drink, BAJO? Well, to answer the first question, let’s look at the last. BAJO, literally ‘lower’ in Spanish, is a low-ABV spirit made for considered drinking. Which, upon receiving a bottle of it, brought me to mirabelle, the focus of this month’s Limelight.

Mirabelle is an oxymoron of sorts, much like London itself. Full of contradicting opinions and opposing ideas, the city is an amalgam of millions of voices, each singing their own song. In London, you can be surrounded by people yet be utterly alone in your anonymity. Similarly, despite her juicy fruit, defined character, and general ubiquity in the city, mirabelle often goes unnoticed.

Should you notice her around this time of year, pluck a fruit from her boughs and try it. Its flavour is tart-yet-sweet, yielding a juiciness on par with a plum, with an underlying sour-sweetness which makes the mouth water. That flavour is what drew me to the fruit for this edition of Limelight.

My theme this month is ‘London in Season’, so when BAJO invited me to design a cocktail, I wanted to counter London’s manic pace with a slow and considered drink. And what could be more time-consuming than foraging and fermenting your own fruits into a wild champagne? It took me 4 days to ferment my base before I could take a sip of that cocktail, and I don’t regret a second of it.

Yet as much as I loved the fruit’s flavour, especially in a cocktail, ultimately what enamoured to mirabelle is what I see her to stand for. Should you pluck that fruit from her branch, or notice the sticky mess on the pavement, you are reminded of nature’s cycles. In a city like London, foraging reminds you to slow down and notice nature’s pace among the city’s busyness. Watching spring’s blossoms turn into summer’s fruit over several months leaves you feeling liberated, and helps keep you grounded in the urban rush.

But why a true Londoner, Barney? Well, another of mirabelle’s virtues is her provenance. Like many in this city, the mirabelle tree is an immigrant. Originally hailing from Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, she slowly wended her way across Europe’s Medieval trade routes, her flavour carried in the small, hardy stones of her fruit. It’s hard to find exactly when she entered England, but that’s not really what matters. The point is that she is as much rooted in this city as any of the rest of us, and she’s here to stay.

When I was foraging for my mirabelles, these feelings were compounded. There I was, a tall boy in a cropped tank and short shorts, stretching high into the boughs of the tree for the fruits others could not reach. And next to me, a middle-aged woman in her hijab, a blanket laid out beneath her on the dry turf to catch all the fruits she beats from the tree with a long stick. Together, we silently got on with our foraging side by side, oblivious of the onlookers walking by.

I don’t know what my neighbour did with hers, but I can certainly guide you as to what to do with yours. On top of their tart-sweetness, mirabelle stones brim with pectin, ensuring a firm-enough set to rival quince cheese, which is why her fruit is so often used to make jam… if you’re so inclined.

I am not. Which is why I would rather brew a ferment from her. So, as I wrote this piece about the sweetness of her flesh, I sat facing a large kilner jar filled with the mirabelles I had foraged, happily fizzing away in a wild champagne. Buoyed by the bubbles and giddy on their own fizz, they reminded me to take the time to slow down, so I can truly appreciate London in season, preferably with a mirabelle BAJO spritz in hand....

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The fig is arguably our earliest cultivar, the first signs of which stretch back over 11,000 years. And, as it has nourished our bodies, so has it nourished our minds, firmly rooting itself in the local lore wherever it has been grown, making it a juicy fruit to dive into for this month’s theme: Queer Food.

As we all know, June is a famously proud month, so my cultural focus looks to ‘Queer Food’. Now, I often get asked what exactly this is, but truth be told, I don’t really have a straight answer for you (pun intended)… However, context I have by the bucketful, so let's get into it.

Etymologically, ‘queer’ means something ‘odd’ or ‘strange’, hence its historic use as an insult for homosexuals. Today, we’ve reclaimed this, and ‘queer’ can be described in two forms: noun and verb. In other words, either something you are, or something you do (or both). Where queerness (the noun) is the sexual identity which goes against the norm, queering (the verb) is a way of thinking which goes against the norm. This is what interests me: how to think queer.

As a food which has fed us for so many millennia, the fig has an abundance of tales to queer, being so wrapped up in ideas of abundance, knowledge, culture and fertility. Arguably, this makes it low-hanging fruit for a Limelight spotlight on ‘Queer Food’, but who doesn’t love a cliché…

Let me elaborate by beginning with the Original Sin. Upon eating the forbidden fruit, the newly enlightened Adam and Eve are so ashamed of their sex organs that they scrabble for something to hide their newfound modesty. This, of course, just so happens to be the fig leaf. Considering the proximity of the fig tree in this moment of revelation, this also puts the fig as a firm contender for the forbidden fruit.

Such drama and excess over something so silly as nudity is, to my mind, deliciously camp. It embodies the excess and flair by which Camp is defined by theorist Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay, Notes on Camp. She opens “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation.”

Camp is the kind of aestheticism which would lead one to dramatically slap a leaf over one’s crotch in an attempt to hide its contents, which ultimately only draws attention to it. The fig, as said leaf, is now part of this shame, making it complicit in the Campiness of this act.

Perhaps that’s enough of my pontifications on the Campiness of Christianity’s origin story, though, for I already hear the hounds howling HERETIC as they come to attack me. Instead, let’s look at other records of the fig.

Let us go a bit further back (or forward, for those ill-informed Creationists among you) to Antiquity, and a tale of Dionysus. You will probably be familiar with Dionysus’ work as god of wine, fertility, festivities and other such sundry debauchery, so it’s little surprise that by the end of this story, he will have found himself fucking a fig phallus atop a shepherd’s grave.

Not a string of words you might ever expect to read together, I know, but considering his divine jurisdiction, it honestly makes sense. This odd situation arose when, on one of his adventures, he promised Prosymnus, a shepherd, sexual favours in return for guiding him to the land of the dead.

Unfortunately, on Dionysus’ return, the shepherd had already died, so he carved a phallus from the bough of a fig, stuck it in the shepherd’s grave, and proceeded to fuck himself upon it. This story, of course, rubbed so many subsequent scholars the wrong way that you’d assume they had fig splinters in their own sphincters; a fact which, to me, makes this tale deliciously Camp, as well.

Camp is, after all, all about excess and artifice, to words which I would use to describe the silliness of most -phobic rhetorics… How dramatic to get upset over what some god does in his own time? Much less the nudity of two people in the privacy of their own garden. Either way, the fig is invariably gay, and I won’t hear another word about it!

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It’s on the counter in a ziplock bag. To the untrained eye, it’s a bunch of leaves, but I know it’s primed to undermine the very foundations of our civilisation. I can almost hear it creaking to be released from between the polythene sheets. The plant is Japanese knotweed, and should I accidentally drop a segment of its stalk somewhere, I could earn myself up to two years in jail or be fined £5k.

Sounds a bit extreme, perhaps, but this is no ordinary weed. Japanese knotweed is a formidable force, not to be trifled with, able to crack through concrete and destabilise foundations. It’s so powerful, in fact, that should the segment I accidentally dropped take root, it could depreciate the value of property it grows upon by up to 15%. Good thing I sealed the bag.

As with many introduced plants which have now naturalised (ecology jargon for having made themselves at home), Japanese knotweed was brought to the UK by the Victorians, whose particular flavour of colonial botany neglected to consider any long-term effects. Mistake number one.

The traits it’s so hated for today were what initially sold it. Fast growing, quick spreading, and firm rooted, it filled out borders in stately homes and prevented erosion on railway sidings. And when it outgrew its welcome, it was cut down and discarded. Mistake number two.

The plant is miraculous in its ability to sprout. Any segment with a node—the junction where leaves grow—has the ability to grow into a new plant. The plant is so persistent in existing that it has resisted all efforts at removal, despite the long-standing UK smear campaign against it. In this, the plant bears a curious similarity to queerness… Hear me out.

Both have historically been shunned by society. Both have been criminalised—albeit for different reasons—and both are still often held with contempt. For both, existence is resistance, regardless of whether they want it to be so. (Side note: not all queer people will identify with weeds, this is a very personal perspective). Another similarity is the spaces they share. Hidden from public view, the plant often grows in spots frequented by gay men cruising. Here, they are away from the public eye, and can express themselves freely.

“So, why obscene?”, I hear you scream. Well, in my mind, Japanese knotweed pairs perfectly with this month’s theme, for obscenity is that which is offensive, shocking, or morally repugnant. When alighting on what ingredient to spotlight, the link was clear: a plant whose mere existence can bankrupt you is obscenity incarnate

Keen to share this theme, I explored this link at my dinner series, At My Table. For this edition, I focused on ‘conspicuous consumption:’ the eating of expensive foods as a wealth signifier. For my amuse bouche, I served a scoop of Japanese knotweed sorbet, which guests were instructed to eat Ortolan-style. This meant covering their heads in a napkin to hide their shame, inspired by the French dish, in which a whole bird (the Ortolan bunting) was force fed and drowned in brandy, was so shameful to eat, that the gourmands consuming it had to hide from god beneath their linen.

Taking the essence of hiding one’s shame, but leaving the less-than-tasteful eating of whole birds, I developed this dish to play with the more notional aspects: what it means to conspicuously desire your own sex in a world that shames you for it.

Perhaps silly to ascribe so much meaning to a single plant. But Japanese knotweed has me in its clutches. We bestow it with so much power that the very sight of it is chilling, when really the plant holds us no ill will.

Or does it…?

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At the start of every spring, a soft pink creeps onto our feeds. Arranged in geometric slices, or swirled into compotes. Glossed in pastries or paired with custards, its delicate fleshy tones announce the end of winter’s bleakness; soft fleshy tones clearing the bleak London skies.

It’s forced rhubarb season, when independent bakeries and foodies alike flock to farmer markets to get their hands on its bright pink stalks to stew into sweet treats and brighten their Instagram feeds.

So synonymous with this season has forced rhubarb’s bright pink to become that it’s almost cliché, but this is no modern phenomenon. In fact, this contemporary celebrity is merely a resurgence several times in the making over the past few hundred years.

Rhubarb first arrived in Western Europe in the 14th century, brought along the Silk Road by those time-honoured importers of education, science and progress: Medieval Muslim merchants. Upon its arrival in Europe, it became the refrain of the very wealthy, as only the richest could afford its long passage here.

At one point, medieval madness for the bright red stalk reached a fever pitch, with rhubarb fetching several times the price of other imported luxuries such as cinnamon, saffron and opium. As is the way with luxury goods, high prices and a trade monopoly drove an interest to cultivate it more locally, and it soon grew across Europe.

In Chinese medicine, it had been valued as a laxative and purgative for over a millennium, a property which has yet to be medically proven, and Europe’s quasi-doctors soon followed suit. In his 1653 Herbal, physician Nicolas Culpeper claimed rhubarb “purgeth the body of choler and phlegm” and was even effective against gonorrhoea.

Woe betide the merry lover who entrusted their sexual health to this leafy stem, for it has no such fortitudes. But perhaps they were sated by the placebo effect of knowing that the crescendo of maladies that untreated gonorrhoea unleashes wouldn’t afflict them.

It would be a couple more centuries before rhubarb saw its second renaissance, all due to an accidental innovation in 1817. At some point after the first frost, an unwitting gardener must have left an upturned bucket over a rhubarb korm—the name of its rootstock—and upon lifting it off, noticed that the plant had shot up in the dark with the bright pink stems we know today.

This is a process called ‘blanching’, where the young shoots are starved from light, preventing their production of chlorophyll, resulting in a sweeter, more tender crop. The news of this happy accident soon spread, and by the late 19th century, the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, an area between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield in Yorkshire, was producing 90% of the world’s crop, and, at peak season, ferrying up to 200 tonnes of the stuff down to London daily on a special express train.

This second success would senesce post WWII with the rise of international fruit imports, but it was far from the end of rhubarb’s story. Recently, fuelled by an interest in seasonality and home-grown produce, many have returned to forced rhubarb, and the stalk now enjoys a certain level of seasonal celebrity as it graces our Instagram feeds and bakery shelves with its delicious, vibrant pinks.

Since 2012, it has borne the EU badge of Protected Designation of Origin, and its vast Yorkshire sheds continue to nurse young rhubarb to life in the dark, lit only by candlelight. And though it is no salve for your STIs, it certainly soothes the soul. For its bright pink stems are now the harbinger of spring to counter the bleak grey days of winter.

Or so I see it. For the less dramatic, it might just look pretty. Either way, this leafy beast beguiled me, and many others, judging by its cultural clout. At the end of every winter, when the greyness feels like it’s permeated the very air you breathe, these fresh bursts of colour come into season. And, at £25 a kilo, don’t the vendors know it, with the lettuce fetching between twice and thrice the price of its cousins, treviso, chioggia, and castelfranco.

Yet radicchio tardivo’s ancestors were far from a luxury leaf, and were instead rooted in hunger and privation. First bred in the Veneto’s soil, radicchios were a hardy answer to the hunger gap, that period between winter’s last crop and the new year’s first growth. Before the age of centralised food systems and air freighting, seasonality dictated our lives, and the radicchio would have been a lifeline to carry you through till spring. Though now we easily skip over the hunger gap, it still echoes today in the religious practice of Lent, the dietary piety of which helped reduce our consumption.

Bitter, astringent and tough, the OG radicchio could weather the harsh frosts of a Northern Italian winter. Tardivo, by contrast, is a delicate thing. Grown outdoors until the first frost, the radicchio’s head is then cut, its leaves trussed, and it is stored away from light to ‘blanch’. This process deprives the plant of light and prevents its leaves from developing chlorophyll, leading to a more delicate-tasting product. Once blanched, the outer leaves are stripped, leaving the tender heart.

Considering radicchio’s roots as such an essential winter crop, it is an irony almost as bittersweet as the lettuce itself, that those stripped outer leaves, which are routinely discarded, comprise 60-70% of the plant. Were a medieval Venetian to know what had become of their winter crop, they’d baulk at the thought.

Yet, despite this wasteful reality, I will still spend a small fortune on acquiring it. And I’m not alone. For gourmands worldwide, radicchio’s icon status could now rival that of the religious figures for whose fast the plant was originally bred. From the plates of London’s most desirable restaurants to its finest suppliers, it is cemented as a cultural signifier of impeccable taste. One to which this East London chef fully subscribes.

My personal love affair with radicchio tardivo reached its peak this January, when I spent New Year’s with a Venetian friend. I’d long loved the leaf, but upon seeing it at every market stall and grocer’s, I couldn’t help myself and bought far more than one person could eat in a week.

This love affair with radicchio was bittersweet, though, for had I done my research before going, I’d have known I was missing the Mostra del Radicchio di Treviso by just a couple of weeks. The Mostra is an annual festival at the end of January, hosted by Venice’s neighbour, Treviso, where the region’s radicchio growers converge in a celebration of the vegetable.

Perhaps it was better I didn’t coincide with it, though, considering that I would easily have forgone Venice’s New Year’s festivities to spend a few days perusing radicchios on the mainland. And considering my friend’s response to learning about the Mostra was “A lettuce festival… Oh great”, I’d have been visiting alone. At any rate, my hand luggage was at capacity with the heads that I had already bought.

Fast forward to March, and the late lettuce is almost gone for another year. And that’s perhaps a good thing, for it is a salient reminder of the seasonality which once dictated our lives, and in which the story of radicchio tardivo is rooted. Even if that seasonality is a practice most of us have forgotten…

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This article is part of an ongoing series called Limelight, where I tell the stories of different ingredients through research, recipes, and my own lived experience. Each article is accompanied by a video on my Instagram: @barneypau. Follow along for more stories, and don’t forget to subscribe!

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Meet the Sicilian lemon, or ‘Siracusa’: renowned for its juicy flesh and aromatic peel, and, surprisingly, its mafia connections. Or perhaps not so surprising. For this violent group’s genesis between the fragrant trees of Sicily’s lemon groves correlates with a period in the mid-nineteenth century when the island’s citrus was Europe’s most lucrative agricultural industry.

Born from opportunity, the mafia’s founders included aristocrats and landowners who sought to profit from the lemon’s value through protection rackets, threats, and a trade monopoly. In The Land Where Lemons Grow, written in 2014, Helena Attlee describes how over time their ranks swelled to include a diverse range of people, from bandits, smugglers and thieves, to those with more “respectable roles,” such as lawyers, politicians and landowners. Though I’d argue the latter roles lack as much ‘respectability’ as their thieving counterparts, it’s merely that they steal from us in broad daylight.

Either way, the lemon’s violent association extends far beyond the mafioso. Indeed, Sicily’s fertile soil has long been soaked with the blood of warring polities. The fruit arrived in Europe through Roman trade in the 2nd century BCE, where it found its home in a matching latitude to its roots. In Sicily, it was popularised as an ornamental plant in Islamic gardens during the island’s three-century-long Moorish occupation around 1,000 years ago.

Here, in this lush, well-irrigated landscape, the fruit thrived, outlasting its Muslim gardeners when the Normans subsequently conquered the island; themselves ousted by the Holy Roman Empire not 100 years later. Despite all this turmoil, the fruit has remained firmly rooted in Sicilian soil for over a millennium, from the Moors to the mafia. Arguably, it is in fact a source of all this violence. And perhaps one can imagine why when you picture fragrant groves overflowing with citrus trees, sloping down Sicily’s hills to the shimmering Tyrrhenian Sea.

Despite this romantic PR, the lemon actually originated in the Himalayas, where it was hybridised from a citron and a bitter orange. The latter, perhaps better known as the Seville orange, whence we get marmalade, is itself a hybrid between pomelo and mandarin orange. These two, along with the citron, are the three progenitors of this citrus family: the OG fruits.

Today, lemon agriculture has reverted to its roots, with India leading global exports, but the Siracusa continues to be an Italian speciality, a sticker proudly announcing its Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status. The same status prohibits the use of wax or fungicide on the fruit’s peel, a process which most lemons are subjected to to improve their longevity. This chemical omission means that all parts of the fruit are edible, making its thick aromatic skin and generous pith perfect for cooking with.

The Siracusa can’t be found in supermarkets, and comes at twice or thrice the cost of the common lemon, but if you seek this fruit for more than its acidic input, I would highly recommend investing. Find your local specialist greengrocers, or place an order with an overpriced supplier, and relish every bite of these sweet aromatic fruits, for despite their bitter, blood-soaked history, their flesh remains sweet, aromatic, and unaffected.

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This article is part of an ongoing series called Limelight, where I tell the stories of different ingredients through research, recipes, and my own lived experience. Each article is accompanied by a video on my Instagram: @barneypau. Follow along for more stories, and don’t forget to subscribe!

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The problem with answering this question, is that ‘queer food’ eludes definition. Despite having written a 5-part series exploring it, authored my master’s thesis about it, and directing a short course on it; I’m still largely unsure what it is. There’s no straight answer—pun intended.

A good place to start, though, is community. Queerness and community are often held in parallel. When the concurrent consensus is an aversion to our particular persuasion, we’re forced to find kin in those like us: our chosen family.

Today, the need for queer community is paramount. The breadcrumbed legislative assimilation and cultural incorporation of previous decades is regressing, placing many of us in immediate danger. As the ‘liberties’ that equalised us to our hetero kin are stripped, we often turn to one another. In the face of adversity queerness comes to the fore for what it really is: a celebration of difference.

Queer community is about adaptation and transformation; it is flux incarnate. If we’re not afforded a seat at the table, we lay a new one. If we’re no longer upheld in common thought, we’ll think for ourselves. If we are forced from spaces, we make our own.

Queer community is more than an opposition to contemporary political and social anti-trans and queerphobic rhetoric, though. It’s also as a reminder that our hope and joy remain abundant. In this, queer food becomes a conduit through which community can be built. By cooking for one another, we share our care and create space.

What follows is an abridged version of my introduction to the Queer Food short course I direct for the Gramounce. Abridging, in general, is not very queer, for reduction begets a deficit in diversity. However, it provides a taster; a lick of a thought to entice you in for more. If it whets your palate, you can always find out more.

For those new to the concept of queer food, this essay is by no means conclusive. Queer food is built upon diversity, so no one idea defines it. I do not identify as an expert in any official capacity; instead I am an avid amateur, as keen to teach as I am to learn.

So, let me preface my understanding of queer food with what I have learned. Queer community has historically been founded on a shared exclusion. We are driven together by that which we are not: straight. This artificial formation, however, is based on the premise of exclusion, and constructed around the heteronorm. So instead, it helps to see queer not as the peripheral, but the general.

When everything that is not one thing becomes defined as another, it creates a space of infinite diversity, because everyone—and everything—queer is, by definition, not the norm. Rather than a constraint, this is liberty incarnate, for it means we are not bound. This is conjecture, for society’s norms quite literally bind us; but queerness’ liberty is a speculative thing, defined by our minds, not by what we’re told we are.

The premise of queer theory is thinking which contradicts the norm. As such, queerness—someone’s sexual identity—and queering—contradicting the norm—are mutually exclusive. One needn’t be queer to think queer. In this context it is more than an identity, it is a methodology: standing in opposition to the norm by subverting reality into potentiality.

Queer food, then, is the coming together of all of these ideas within the culinary spectrum. As with queerness, and queering, it is unlimited in its potential, taking the realities and norms within which our ideas of food exist, and reimagining them in new forms.

Throughout this course, you will hear a diversity of perspectives of what this means, each with their own ideas, experiences, and intersectionalities. In their combination, perhaps you might find inspiration, for the point of this course is not so much to provide answers, but to provoke more questioning. Queerness and queering are not panaceas to the issues our societies face; we do not bear the burden of finding creative solutions. Instead, we can keep inquiring, remain curious and stay queer.

For more info on how to sign up to the Gramounce Queer Food short course, visit their website. The course begins with a London-based residency running from the 22nd-28th September, followed by an 8-week online course starting on the 1st October.

The images above are from previous fundraisers organised by myself and Every Mouth Needs Filling for queers in our community. Donate to P. Eldridge’s gender-affirming care here. Donate to H’s gender-affirming care here.

The house stands proud at the top of the valley, peeking over the trees. It has been there for a long time, its permanence writ large in heavy architecture built to outlive the generations. Yet its future is uncertain as its history gets slowly overgrown. There are countless other ruins, some so far gone they’re only traceable by the fruit trees they’ve left behind.

I’ve come here looking for plums, with some content-filming in mind. I climb the slopes, filming the odd snippet here and there, only really appreciating the house when I’m finally upon it. It’s magisterial, in the most municipal sense of the word. It exuded the honest, austere authority of a hard life lived off the land. Three stories in the main building, with an annex off to the side, and several barns around.

The ground floor, accessed from the courtyard, would have been for livestock. It’s arched ceiling a strong as the day it was built. The top two floors were for humans. Three, perhaps four generations of cousins, siblings and more living in the uncomfortable intimacy of community. But they’ve long since gone.

Even though the house might stand proud, its roof has already caved, and soon the rest will follow. It will fall, they all do. Eventually, they’re swallowed by nature as it reclaims its space, pulling the stones back down to the earth from which they were dug. Looking away from the house, I turn my eyes to the view.

These mountains are feral. Once they were domesticated, the flanks of their hills stepped in terraces upon whose produce the population subsisted. Now, these agricultural scars heal under a thick skin of Douglas pine, hiding the gashes of their past. It seems wild, unless you know where to look.

There’s something fascinating about these ruins. They’re mysterious in their emptiness, filled with unknown phantoms and untold stories. Whenever our family visits them, we lament their loss, wondering why no one reclaims them. Yet something is reclaiming them.

Slowly but surely, leaf by stem, nature has been returning the ruins to a landscape only the rocks now remember. What if nature’s ability to turn our permanence back into its own is the real fascination here? What if, rather than feeling sad about the ruins crumbling into the woods, we celebrate the woods growing up through ruins?

The fruit trees sit somewhere between this, as the remnants of human agriculture, but agents of natural reclamation. Planted by human hands, or seeded from the fruits of trees once sowed; they are an artificial relic. Someone's investment into future generations who would one day no longer live here, as much bas they are part of the natural landscape.

Now they’re part of the flora, as naturalised as the pines. They themselves were once a plantation escapee, now turned native, whose every green trunks cloaked the hills, colonising the post-agricultural landscape. In both the fruit trees and the pines is the memory of something human, and the resistance of something natural.

In ecology, whether something belongs or not is defined by a baseline. This is a point in time before which everything is ‘native’, and after which everything is ‘invasive’. But nature doesn’t do so well with our arbitrary binaries. Who’s to say that the fruit trees aren’t ‘native’, or the pines for that matter. Are we the ‘invasive’?

There aren’t any plums here this year which is a shame, perhaps an early frost nipped them in the bud. I stand looking out from the house, struggling to imagine what life would have been like. ‘A shame’ for me could have been life and death for those who planted them. A failed harvest meant a hungry winter; a deficit of essential vitamins that could otherwise have ensured survival.

I turn to the blackberries instead. It’s hard to explain, but they grow differently here than back in England. Something about the long harsh winters and the arid summer sun making them harder, tougher, more flavoursome. Like the fruit trees, they are utterly a product of their environment.

As I pick them, and I think about the generations that worked this land, it feels a bit flippant to be filming this for content. Topless foraging for the likes, building my brand. The marketing jargon which fills my London life suddenly feels very vapid here, standing in these ruins. The people who planted these trees did so out of necessity, if they didn’t they might have starved.

But not all nourishment is nutritional, and me being here means I am sharing in their history as I search for plums on their trees. I look at the ruins and imagine their true legacy not in the edifices they erected, but the wood of the trees with which they enriched the landscape. Perhaps this is the most impactful mark they unwittingly made.

Though their individual stories are gone, and their ruins become ever more overgrown, their collective memory lives on in the fruit trees. Long after the last wall has fallen, the trees will keep self-seeding, their place a faint trace of once was. You just have to know where to look.

This article was written as part of a 3-part miniseries documenting these crumbling ruins and their fruit trees. To watch the videos, visit my Instagram @barneypau.

Cities. Messy, loud crescendoes of chaos where millions ebb and flow. Built to be monolithic, they represent the culmination of human culture and its dominion over nature. Tall towers are a testament to this, resolute sentinels guarding against uninvited intruders. Here, greenery is only allowed in its most docile form; all else is eschewed. Though they might morph and change in style and size, their permanence is absolute. Or is it?

Lost amongst our monuments and buildings, myriad minute ecologies thrive in plain sight; seen by many, but unnoticed by most. From the micro to the macro they take every shape and size, squeezed into the city’s most unexpected corners. Here, they exist in transient states of perpetual uncertainty, for each day could end in a spray of glyphosate, or the tug of a gloved hand. So they’re found in spots that we’ve forgotten, for remaining lost ensures their longevity.

Firmly rooted between nature and culture, the liminal ecology does more than just grow in the grey. It bridges the divide drawn by our dualism, reuniting the human and more-than-human in a messy multi-species amalgam. Beyond the physical, it becomes a metaphor of resistance, paralleled with other forms of non-normative existence.12 Its feelers creep into crannies and slide through slivers, forming city-wide revolutionary networks of self-seeded greenery. 

A bold claim to make for a collection of pollution-muted plants growing amongst the brightly coloured rubbish. Yet even in the tenderest of their tendrils, one can find resilience. Their tips—so soft to the touch—can raze foundations, breaking through the toughest materials. Alone, they have little impact on our cities. Left to their own endeavours, they could well raze our foundations sooner than we’d like to think. United, they become a radical force against our deeply ingrained growthism.

Growthism, also called productivism, is the belief that progress is essential to human purpose.3 We can see this on an international scale through transcontinental trade and manufacturing. Yet it also trickles down into the core tenets of our self-identity. We believe that we must progress to be successful. Stasis or regress are thus posited as failure in their opposition to growthism’s supposed success. 

On a societal level, in this country certainly, many of our core value systems are built upon growthism. This isn't necessarily on us, though. Well, not all of it, anyway. We’ve been taught to consume, while having the true cost of that consumption hidden from us. Yet the ecological and social cost of producing our food, mining our metals, or growing our clothes harms us more than we know. In this light, growthism’s drive for progress becomes a self-destructive force, taking us down with it. So when a liminal ecology pops up between the bricks I rejoice. It might only be small, but even the biggest movements began at a grassroots level.

Our cities are built upon the notion of growthism. Progressively newer, bigger, better; they exist under the imperative to prioritise human endeavour over all else. As such, they’re designed to be ecologically barren, playing host to only the most domesticated of non-human species. Against this framework, the liminal ecology is a generative force, one full of infinite potential and diversity. It can exist wherever, and thrive where nothing else will.

More often than not the lost liminal ecology is filled with species we call ‘weeds:’4 plants defined by growing where we want them not to. Weeds have been diligently regreening our cities for centuries, repairing the landscapes we destroy and building on the ones we create. In the chaos of our destruction, their remediation shines green against the grey. What injustice then, that even as they repair our mess we find such ire for them.

This disdain is unanimous. In Spanish, there’s a saying that Hierba mala nunca muere, ‘weeds never die’. It’s a colloquialism suggesting bad people/things last longer than good. Beneath this use, though, it could suggests the resilience needed for a life led outside the law. Most people would call this criminal, but law is a fickle thing. Aside from the absolutes—don’t kill, steal, rape, etc.—many laws are designed to suppress. It’s not so long since so-called ‘buggery’ was a crime. Rather than snide, then, perhaps this idiom is endearing, commending resistance against repression. Long live las malas hierbas.

Spanish is an interesting lens through which to understand weeds. There is no specific name for them, they are just called malas hierbas, ‘bad herbs.’ This isn’t so much to do with them being ‘bad’ for us; many weeds’ medicinal and nutritional properties abound. Instead, the Spanish definition aligns with its English counterpart, of a plant which is in the wrong place: defining them by their perceived lack of value.
At the start of this article, I suggested how, by being able to ‘exist wherever’ in the city, the liminal ecology bridges the divide drawn by our dualism. To elaborate, dualism is a notional division between human and more-than-human existences. The original concept was coined by philosopher René Descartes who understood physical functions as separate from mental processing.5

Descartes was not alone in his dualistic thinking. From philosopher Immanuel Kant’s delineation between human sentience and non-human instinctiveness;6 to the Abrahamic notion of the world as a human resource: we have a long history of prioritising ourselves. Indeed, its not hard to see where this superiority complex might have found its genesis, for as is writ in Genesis “everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”7
The Abrahamic religions took this as gospel and placed humans atop a vast hierarchy, under which all other organisms were then arranged. Cue humanity’s wanton environmental destruction in search of every extractable so-called ‘resource’ we can find. 

So… how does the grimy liminal ecology have anything to do with dusty medieval-cum-biblical notions of dualism? Well, I may believe Kant’s dualism misguided, but his other philosophising rang true “Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”8 If the permanence of our monolithic structures represents the pinnacle of our species’ dominance of nature, then the small, forgotten liminal spaces in between them represent the antithesis. In their growth, they deny growthism.

That which is not controlled represents a threat to the controller. As such, I find these ecologies to be fertile ground in which to seed alternative thought and social metaphors. The liminal ecology has always opposed what growthism values. Growing in the wrong place, it resists what we hold of ‘worth’. This is perhaps what I find to be its valuable trait. 

It is bold to label the liminal ecology as resistant. In fact, it verges on hubris. In all our busyness, we forget that we’re but a blip on planetary timelines, despite all our earth-changing impacts. As professor Alan Weisman writes in The World Without Us (2007), “without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”9 It’s thus important to recognise that my sentiments are an entirely human projection, for the liminal ecology just grows where it’s seeded. It has no say in my interpretation of it; just as it exists unbound by any notions I may have. Its growth isn’t actually resistance, it’s simply existence. 

Yet any agency it may have has been bulldozed by human bias, so to exist it must resist. This is my personal opinion, rooted in my affinity with the liminal ecology and its weeds. I resonate with its existence. Note: I do not see myself as without value, or being in the wrong place. Far from it. I see myself in opposition to those who tell me I am in what they perceive to be the wrong place. I am far from lost.

Where I do lose myself is in the liminal ecology, for here I find I am at peace. I wonder whence the seeds came; how one species interacts with one another. I walk the street peering at forgotten corners, seeing which weeds might thrive where. It has shown me how to find beauty and balance in the countless existences around me, happy to walk quite lost in my own thought.

To lose oneself is to become deeply involved in something. So much so that all our attention and thoughts are engaged. This often takes place outside the physical realm; in a task, passion, or process which consumes us. So let’s lose ourselves in the liminal and find inspiration there, for in these ecologies lie embodied knowledge of how to thrive in the face of adversity. By becoming utterly rapt, we might pause growthism, and lose ourselves in the growth of other species, for they’re the ones who can help us find the connection with nature again. 

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Aliment is, in essence, elemental. From the solar to the cellular, all organisms require nutriment; it is a rudiment of life. How organisms find this food is myriad, but for many, this is through an alimentary canal which connects the organism to its nourishment. What is issued from this canal could then also be considered elemental. The rudiments of sound-making are, for instance, integral to many organism’s existences, and whence guttural sounds come.

The ferments in Bodies of Knowledge are not meant for human consumption. In this simple fact, they gain agency from anthropocentric alignments, becoming subject instead of object. Connecting their most elemental alimentation, to the elemental sounds that issue from the human alimentary canal is an exercise in renegotiating our relationships with the world around us. The installation invites us to mentally metabolise existing thinking around the more-than-human and ferment it into something new. Placing them on our level and opening them up to our modes of communication, invites humans to see the non-human anew.

Fermentation is a mystery to most. Bubbling surfaces, changing forms, shifting textures; its inexplicable reactions occur on scales only science can see. So, historically, we’ve surmised, devising our own explanations for its magical work. Indeed, had ferments not leavened our bread, brewed our booze, or preserved our produce, they might have been seen as demonic for the visceral life they possess. 
We now know more of their workings. Sort of… Scientifically, fermentation is an enzymatic metabolic process which chemically alters organic matter. It is, in other words, how microbes eat, and has been suggested1—and contested2—as the oldest metabolic act on earth. Biochemists’ disagreements aside, fermentation is more ancient than we can comprehend. As they ferment, microbes de- and reconstruct matter. For them, this is how they thrive. For us, it unlocks food’s bioavailability, preserves it, and makes it tastier. 

Yet despite these awesome tendencies, our understanding belies fermentation’s infinite complexity. We reduce it to chemical or culinary processes, refining its inherent diversity with our notional conformity. Conceptually, fermentation embodies the knowledge to complexify, pollute, decompose and build thinking. They are ready to foment us. 

What follows, then, is a theoretical ferment. Nonlinear in trajectory, nonsensical in elaboration, at times over-brewed, sometimes undeveloped; what you read is a fizzy, sticky mess. Thoughts combine, decompose, are reimagined and reconstructed. The only theoretical framework within which we metabolise thinking is disorder. It may seem contradictory to convey through chaos, but it is in their familiarity that recognised systems of communication become culturally codified. In this maelstrom of mentalisation thoughts become elemental. Stripped of context and construct, these notional ailments can nourish new thinking. Confused? As am I, but confusion isn’t bad. In fact, it liberates in its lack of certainty, opening our minds to alternate ways of thinking. Here, ferments become analogous, for they are adaptation incarnate; the very embodiment of decentralised thought.

In fact, ferments have influenced our thinking for aeons, and were perhaps even instrumental in our species’ evolution. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss suggests fermentation marks humans’ shift from nature to culture. He distinguishes ‘natural’ humans consuming honey and rainwater found fermenting in a hollow tree; from ‘cultural’ humans placing honey and water in a hollowed tree to ferment.3

Though his ideas remain pertinent, Levi-Strauss’ dualism is somewhat outdated, for it upholds the nature-culture divide. Historically, this has been used to demarcate safe from unsafe, known from unknown, controlled from uncontrolled; as is evidenced in culture’s etymology. From the Latin colere, meaning to ‘tend, or cultivate,’ the term is rooted in farming, defining human culture by our penchant for ploughing. Semantic trickery that ferments are also called ‘cultures,’ when they far outdate the existence of the plants for which we plough. Indeed, considering the elemental nature of these cultures’ alimentation, it’s somewhat presumptuous of us to term them after our tendency to tend fields. 

The term ‘culture’ finds some redemption in an Ancient Roman use, when orator Cicero suggested cultura anima—‘cultivation of the soul’—as the highest form of philosophical thought.4 As a study of the existential, it’s perhaps apt for ferments to share this definition, for, as Levi-Strauss suggested, it’s in their consumption that we evolved to even have such critical inquiries. If anything, they cultivated us.

Despite being called ‘cultures,’ ferments are its notional antithesis. Defined as ‘ideas, customs, and social behaviour,’5 ‘culture’ maintains normativity. In his Fermentation as Metaphor, Sandor Ellix Katz describes fermentation as an engine of social change, “transforming what was into what’s next.”6 Just as a single microbe can ferment a substrate; a single idea foments change in the norm. In this, ferments elicit ‘abjection:’ defined by philosopher Julia Kristeva as a reaction to the breakdown of meaning, leading to a loss of distinction between subject and object; self and other.7 Ferments embody this breakdown, corrupting and polluting—i.e. diversifying—existing matter into something new.

Corruption and pollution have a bad rep. They indicate a shift from pure to impure; something often seen as negative. But is not ‘pollute the mind’ synonymous with ‘diversified thinking’? Such reconsiderations change our perceptions of ferments from objects to subjects. Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake suggests reconsidering perception might understand other species better, for “speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears”.8 In their subjectivity, ferments escape our jars to pollute our minds, lifting them beyond our label of leavener. So, to end with an opening, go forth and question your perceptions, and wonder: How might ferments foment you?

The selection of foraged leaves before you has been curated to nourish both body and mind. Most are considered weeds; a line-up of everything from the usual suspects to the country’s most wanted. Those that aren’t weeds hold their own importance, adding to this story with their unique tale.

These leaves are foraged from Hackney Marshes, one of the largest common lands left in London. Despite a history of intervention, the marshes have never been inhabited; a relic of pre-London London, witness to the city’s multi-millennia megalopolisation. Imbued with this history, this salad reconciles the divide we have placed between nature and culture. These plants have grown on borderlands; their roots tapping both the urban and the natural, reconnecting our dualistic understanding of the world. 

In the rural, many of these plants find their homes in hedgerows; diverse borderland sanctuaries starkly contrasted to the monocrops they abut. In witchcraft, hedges cross across worlds, states of being, and ways of thinking;1 liminal spaces of mystery where nothing is certain. Plants there become tools of transition and transversing. 
In the urban, the hedge finds equivalent in the liminal spaces lining our sprawl: cracking our pavements, skirting our buildings, cloaking our refuse. These plants are conduits, not pests, facilitating our reconnection to a nature we’ve forgotten. Their roots permeate our borders with their expressive diversity, knitting together our world and theirs.

Tossed with a little folklore, sprinkled with philosophy, and paired with a healthy dose of interpretation, the salad before you tells a tale of diversity, resistance, and non-normativity. In finding the wisdoms within I spoke with witches, consulted herbalists, and explored my own understanding. This salad is thus imbued with the thoughts, feelings, folklore and philosophies of myriad thinkers. So let’s come together, take a forkful, and dive into a thicket thick with folkloric and philosophic wisdom, to nourish our minds with a salad of their leaves. 

First we have ‘field mustard’ [Rhamphospermum arvense], looking much like slender sprouting broccoli with yellow blooms. Field mustard is an unsung hero of the human diet, its diverse genetic material having given us everything from cauli to kohlrabi. Filled as it is with such possibility, a single fiery bite might ignite within us its endless potential for reincarnation. In the Christian tradition, Jesus said had they as much faith as a mustard seed they could move mountains:2 i.e. even the smallest grain of faith can make monumental change. Two millennia hence, this isn’t so far from the truth, for the extractivism this faith dictates sees us change landscapes. Abandoning this dominant outlook, I instead place my faith in field mustard, a wild plant whose ability to shift species speaks more to me than the conversion of water to wine. 

With elderflower [Sambucus nigra] thinking is conflicted, which perhaps only testifies to the widespread appreciation of its powers. “You should bow to [it] before you pick it” says the witch I consulted, “and ask permission cos it's the elders, show some respect.”3 Burn an elder and the devil will come, though a tree near the house will keep them at bay. This is perhaps because Judas hanged himself from its boughs. Anyone who’s encountered an elder, however, will tell you that lest Judas were severely underweight, its brittle branches would not a gallows make. Despite supposedly abetting in Judas’ death by suicide, the plant is perhaps most known for its life-giving attributes, rich in vitamins and antiviral properties.

Next, we have honesty [Lunaria annua], a cousin of mustard. The name ‘honesty’ originates in the 16th century, referring to the seed pod’s translucent inner-layers, through which the seeds reveal themselves truthfully. Curious, then, that its Danish and Dutch monikers, judaspenge and judaspenning respectively, mean ‘coins of Judas’ alluding to his betrayal of Jesus. In this, honesty and elder see eye to eye, for both plants have had their integrity questioned by the same religious ramblings.
Unrelated to elder but nonetheless connected, ground elder [Aegopodium podagraria]. Also called gout wort, this name’s suffix, from the Old English wyrt meaning ‘root’, indicates its ancient use as a medicinal herb to treat, as the prefix suggests, gout. This medicinal use seemed to be corroborated by European monks, for they carried it with them to many of their monasteries. The famed herbalist Hildegard von Bingen was also a fan, mentioning its use in her Physica (1158 CE). However, even the mother of natural history can’t sway some. According to our witch, “if one inch of the stinking bastard gets in your garden you turn your back and it’s taken over.”4

Garlic mustard [Alliaria petiolata] “scares the shit” out of our witch, who can’t have it in the house. “A [sic] old friend went peculiar once when he saw somebody picking it […] and now I've got that fear!”5 In spite of her fear, most folklore overlooks this plant, perhaps because its conspicuity earned it a familiarity with which no symbolism need be associated. Its history of disinterest includes its Latinate name, Alliaria petiolata meaning ‘resembling an Allium with a leaf stalk.’ At any rate, it’s a salad stalwart and a welcome snack, though I’d avoid leaves past two thumb’s width for their astringency; perhaps a bitterness at its social disregard.

For Japanese knotweed [Reynoutria japonica] see The ASBO Weed. In addendum to this, though: a tale of how we met. I found them online, through an illicit website6 where different members of their species are listed, each with their geolocation. It felt wrong to meet up, but my desire overpowered my caution, and we found one another under the cover of rain and greenery on the edge of a park. Since then, I haven’t looked back, revisiting them often in their green retreat. 

The bright blooms of red valerian [Centranthus ruber] are flowers I associate most readily with such liminal spaces as building sites, railway sidings, and gravel pits. Thoroughly at home on the peripheries of our existence, perhaps this species' most notable moment on centre stage is in its confusion with its distant relative true valerian [Valeriana officinalis]. Where the latter has been noted for its myriad medicinal properties since before Hippocrates’ time; the former’s main claim is that it makes a rather good salad addition. The name ‘valerien,’ thus belies this general bloom. Rooted in the Latin valere, ‘be strong,’ whence ‘valour’ comes; true valerian’s more understated cousin would be perhaps better named ‘red genialis’ for its gentler nature. At any rate, our witch rates it excellent for compost, “as is oak, [honesty] and something else I can't remember. Ha ha.”7

Though it might be called ‘common’ comfrey [Symphytum officinale]; our witch testifies, there’s “[n]othing common about [it].”8 Going by both knitbone (“cos it knits bones together”) and boneset, its Latinate name also testifies to its healing properties; the suffix officinale indicates a widespread medicinal application. So potent are its abilities, in fact, that Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian (1652) suggests when boiling it with “disserved” (separate) pieces of flesh, it will join them back together.9 Aside from these more spurious claims, comfrey has a long history of treating ailments; its use recorded as far back as 400 BCE.10 Comfrey, like valerian, oak and honesty, will benefit compost, and as a perennial will be sure to grace you annually.

We finish with oak [Quercuc robus]. Hardly a weed, I know; more nation’s sweetheart than a national pest. Oak is a relic of our once-wooded landscape, though as our witch laments, “we had to chop them down to build an armarda [sic].”11 Notwithstanding this general statement, the witch isn’t wrong, and for several centuries this oak-loving nation stripped its land of trees. So valuable did oak become, that a 1691 Charter decreed all trees over 24 inches in diameter to automatically belong to the crown. By the 18th century a British gunship required 4,000 oaks to build, without counting the wood burnt for smelting.12 It is ironic, then, that this tree’s status as national symbol comes from when a particular oak unwittingly hid a king from his parliamentarian pursuers during the English Civil War. One can only assume this tree did not follow contemporary politics, for had it known all they sought was democracy, I’m sure it would have ousted the autocrat from betwixt its branches. Aside from royal politics, one source suggests witches once wore acorns to secretly identify one another; the queer handkerchief of the Middle Ages.13 

The astute reader might have noticed their salad laced with contrasting tales of folkloric perceptions and Christian prescriptions, often at odds. This is a reflection of the dualism which we examined upon our first bite. The Christian tradition holds that the Earth and its resources are ours for the taking, facilitated by a notional division between humans and the rest of nature—the ‘nature-culture’ divide. This dualistic thinking facilitates extractivism, and is of detriment to our world.

By positing these weeds as a conduit between these worlds, and by serving them to you both physically and notionally, I present them as our lifeline; reconnecting us to something we’ve forgotten. I know, it is ambitious to think that a bite of salad might change your perceptions. But perhaps in the profusion of diverse flavours and notions contained in the bowl before you, you might be inspired to think a little differently, and see these species as connecting us to a nature we are a part of, not apart from.

Sat on the counter in an innocuous ziplock bag, is a most noxious thing. Malignly bent, miscreant by intent; its cold would-be cadaver primed to undermine the very foundations of civilisation. I can almost hear it jittering in its antihuman resolve, creaking to be released from between the polythene sheets. 

Curious, then, that when I tried a bite it tasted quite like chard, albeit less oxalic in flavour. More mellow than tannic. Quite far, then, from the triffid-like creature I’d imagined; one equipped to divest me of my very humanity should it have the chance. 
Despite its suitability for a light salad, there is reason behind this plant's social vilification. Should a slither of its rhizomatic stalk find itself in your property’s soil, and grow into a plant, you will be legally condemned unless you rid it at all costs.

If you find it on your property and decide not to take action, this plant could earn you your very own ASBO.1 And woe betide they who abet its spread, who might, according to Part II, Section 9 of the Wildlife and Country Act 1981, find themselves deserved of 6 months behind bars.23

I second-guessed posting about it, you know. Will someone track this down, will I be held responsible for government-decreed ecocide? I’ve gone as far as to include a caveat in its caption, that “this harvest was taken from a reported, untreated location.” I’m not sure whose ire this will sate, but it’s abated my self-admonishment.

Animate in its defamation, this plant is so maligned that it felt illicit to touch; a thrill of ill-doing in just plucking a leaf. Yet it was more than that, it was as if it would take root in my hand, parasitise my body, consume me alive. 

I stung myself on a nettle wiping my knife clean after I was done harvesting—I was by far the most destructive creature there—and now the sting’s tingle is tinged with concern that there might be a rhizome embedded in my flesh. That I, too, will succumb to foundational rot should I not out that damned spot and purge myself of its corrosive evil. 

Unlike Lady Macbeth, I am not an accomplice to regicide—even if the thought is appealing—so my hands are notionally clean. In fact, if this plant really is animate, the unwitting rhizomes-to-be in the stalks I harvested will suffer a worse fate than King Duncan; condemned to slowly drown and be digested by the ferments I will make of them. Yet it is awesome the power this polythene bag’s content has over me. 

I’m reminded of the sublime; an aesthetic philosophy of the terrifying greatness of nature. Usually reserved for monumental things such as mountains and gorges, I feel it here in the hold this plant has over me. The knowledge that, should I dare to discard it improperly, a jungle will spring from its stem.

Both the sublime and my reaction to this plant are socially prescribed fear of the unknown. The sublime is something unfathomably larger than us, which is only able to be appreciated by this categorisation as something beyond our power. The plant, whose mere existence proves a persistent ability to resist our eradication, is a raw, uncontrollable power. 

In this power it becomes the embodiment of abjection, shaking our society’s very foundations, literally and metaphorically. Whereas the sublime is passive—mountains, in all their might, care not what we think of them—the abject is active. It is intent on notionally corroding our rules and deconstructing our thinking… or so we think.

Abjection is often fear at the mere thought of something uncontrollable, and, in this, finds its power. Philosophers Mary Douglas,4 Michel Foucault,5 and Jonathan Dollimore6 have all, in their own words, theorised on this power; the power of that which is uncontrolled, and how this can have such a hold over us. 

A power, indeed, that this plant has. The thought that its voracious appetite, once provoked, destroys all in its path, tumbling buildings, crumbling cities. The power it has over me, that I wash my hands after touching it, even after having washed the pa thrice. The power to think that it might send tendrils out of its plastic bag, that it might grow into the hidden corners of my home; into the hidden corners of me. Had it not won me over with its zingy flavour. 

Don’t get me wrong, the plant is absolutely potent. It can crack through concrete, undermining everything we’ve built and persisting in existing despite our best efforts. But it does not deserve the ill will we have bestowed upon it, the supernatural evilness which chills us at its very sight. It is how it makes us doubt our self-professed superiority, this is what’s scary, not the plant. Japanese Knotweed holds us no ill will. 

Or does it?

This piece was written in research for my upcoming supper club A Weed by Any Other Name… on 04/05/24. It will be published as part of a larger body of research on weeds for Tenderfoot, an online platform exploring engagement and negotiation with the world of stuff, material and objects.

The importance of familiarity is no foreign concept to the forager. This is perhaps best illustrated by Apiaceae (or Umbelliferae). Like any extended family, its members range from those who join you every Christmas, to the toxic individuals that you’d rather avoid. Both familiar and foreign, they are found in every corner of Britain, ranging from some of our most loved vegetables to our deadliest plants. Growing in the monocultured fields that feed us and hiding in the forest glades we have forgotten, one need only step outside the door to encounter a member of this family.

​When identifying the Apiaceae family, familiarity is key. What looked like Chervil when picking it might prove to be a fatal garnish upon eating it. Similarly, the difference between Hogweed and its giant cousin might be challenging to identify in their spring growth, but the consequences of consuming the wrong one could be dire. Both Umbelliferae – named for their ‘umbels’ of flowers – Hogweed and Giant Hogweed hold much in common apart from, unsurprisingly, their size. Reported to be very tasty, and packing more protein than curly kale, the former is a delicious and nutritious food-for-free. Pick the wrong shoots though, and the sap of the latter will cause severe phytophotodermatitis, meaning the skin can no longer protect itself from sunlight and erupts in blisters and burns.

In the valley behind my home, there is a forgotten stream that winds its way quietly through avenues of ancient hazel. Its bed is speckled red with terracotta sherds – all that remains of the market gardens that once stood there – and its banks are lush with vegetation. Walk these banks and one might see what looks like Parsley swaying in the breeze. Bruise the plant's leaves and it smells much like Parsley too, and its tuberous roots, exposed by the stream, could easily be mistaken for Wild Parsnip. Like with any plant, it would be illegal to uproot without the landowner’s permission – though the hapless forager who makes this mistake would have bigger problems on their hands than an angry farmer descending upon them. 

​Known by Hemlock Water-Dropwort, ‘dead man's fingers’ or ‘dead tongue,’ a bite of this plant's root is enough to kill a cow. Credited with Socrates’ death, it is laced with neurotoxins that wreak havoc on its consumer, including renal failure, spasmodic convulsions, paralysis and asphyxiation. Perhaps the grisliest of its attributed effects is the “sardonic grin:” facial spasms that leave a malevolent rictus smile pulled across the victim’s face in death. 

Many of us know of the possible toxicity of mushrooms – their deadly potential well documented in our lore – but the same edict of familiarity is as important when foraging for flora as it is for fungi. Cases of misidentification of plants are commonplace in our history, and one need only make a misplaced assumption about what herb they think they’re picking to be exposing themselves to a dangerous fate. Case in point: Apiaceae.

Hedgerow, (2010). by Wright, J. London: Bloomsbury

Know Your Carrots., by Williams, M. Galloway. [gallowaywildfoods.com]

Hemlock Water Dropwort., by Wild Food UK. [wildfooduk.com]

Listening to the sounds of trees crashing to the ground is horrible. Rending cracks and wrenching crunches announce an imminent fall, and then, in slow motion, they lean, tip, and topple. The crash hits hard. You hear the branches first, then WHUMF!, a sound wave explodes across the valley. Then silence. A silence that feels like an age, but is broken only seconds later by the growl of the chainsaw as it tears into the next tree. 

The ever-hungry saw is never sated; its appetite a bottomless pit into which tree after tree tumbles. Deforestation around here has, over the last year, seen much of this landscape stripped bare of its cool, temperate chestnut forests. Trunks thick with myriad mosses are now piled high in ordered pyramids, and roots that once burst with seasonal fungi are laid bare. What were seemingly endless woodlands now each has a horizon, a treeline glimpsed between the trunks.

The irony that Amazon.com is to blame is not beyond me. But Amazon.com needs paper. After the pandemic, more people are working from home, and a deficit of recycled paper left the behemoth without its boxes. With nothing in which to freight its neverending consumables, it turned its hungry eyes to FSC woodlands.1 Supposedly “stewarding” forests, the FSC has been questioned for its authenticity, and even challenged as a front,2 making the transparency of the ‘green’ packaging with which Amazon.com washes itself about as clear as mud.

It is similarly ironic that Amazon.com is named after the Amazon. Their pairing sounds like the preface of a bad joke: the all-consuming multi-national, and the last giant rainforest threatened by deforestation. ‘Lungs of the earth,’ they called it. What a burden to bear: just by virtue of outlasting other expansive tracts of woodland, 5.5 million km² of rainforest is cooly labelled a ‘carbon sink.’3 Until recently, the Amazon was considered a ‘virgin forest,’ defined by the dictionary as “not yet used, exploited, or processed.” It’s not. That’s just Western Eurocentrism talking. 

In fact, the Amazon shows signs of millennia of human activity pre-1492.4 When agriculture supposedly yawned into existence some 12,000 years ago, research suggests three-quarters of the planet was already anthropogenically altered.5 Colonists can’t face a rival though, and upon their arrival, the forest was labelled virginal because it hadn’t been cultivated à la Européen; i.e. utterly exploited. Unto this supposedly chaste place, the notion of an ‘untouched wilderness’ was applied; a playground in which heterosexual white men could perform their manly masculinity through wholesale extraction.6

The Amazon—and its eponymous Amazon.com—are named after the Amazons, an Ancient Grecian mythological tribe of female warriors. In this all-female society, interactions with men were solely reproductive. If the Amazon’s progeny were female, they were raised as daughters. Undesired male offspring weren’t welcome and returned with such transactional efficiency as to challenge Amazon.com.

One suggested—yet disputed—origin of the Amazon's ambiguous name is their practice of cutting off their right breasts to better use the bow—a- ‘without,’ mazos ‘breast’. The Amazons were self-emancipated, favouring matriarchy in lieu of men. Perhaps their self-mastectomies reflected this; half-ridding themselves of the social shackles which motherhood often traditionally placed upon them as women. 

Under the patriarchy, in which femininity equals vulnerability, women need men to protect them, and vulnerable men are sissies. These socially constructed gender sensibilities are what psychologist Walt Odets terms “unnatural and humanly impoverishing.”7 They are imposed systems that help maintain social order. In Christian tradition, the virgin is perhaps the epitome of vulnerability; an immaculate, free from sin. 

The virtue of a forest being virginal is—as the dictionary so eloquently puts it—its potential for exploitation. If human virgins and virgin forests share commonalities, then they are yet to be used, exploited, or processed. You’d hope that today if a God were to conceive a messiah in a virgin’s womb, it might not fly as ‘immaculate’ in a court of law, though, as the #metoo movement suggests, this particular form of exploitation continues to be overlooked.

Another CRASH!: another tree, gone. It is not for nothing they call it Mother Nature; the normative tropes of fertility and reproduction being its social burden to bear. Upon this reproduction, our extractivism relies. The local farmer indicates his intent on wholesale local deforestation: “They’ll grow back.” I suppose they will… but need they? Are all those things in their eco boxes wholly necessary? Who knows. I deleted my Amazon.com account ‘in protest,’ but I still use my dad’s on the sly. I’m not culpable if it’s not under my name, am I? CRASH! That’s another few boxes. I’ll forget on my return to London, and when my next order arrives, that recyclable packaging will assuage my eco-anxiety. 

I take a sip of my coffee as I listen to the world fall around me. We ran out of the single-origin this morning and I had to have a Lavazza. Needs must. It’s easy to forget about the swathes of tropical rainforest deforested for your commodity coffee when you’re having to deal with such a compromise of flavour.8 Plus, there’s deforestation within earshot, so how am I supposed to be conscious of both? They say coffee is in crisis; that within years we’ll no longer be able to have it.9 Another bridge to cross, but let's wait until we come to it. For now, let’s not enjoy our Lavazza and continue fretting about Amazon.com.

Perhaps the analogy of Amazon.com cutting off the Earth’s right tit to better function commercially is contentious? I neither identify as female; nor was biologically born as one. My main thoughts on social fertility centre on the injustices faced by queer people through normative centrism on biological reproduction. Personally, I think comparing Amazon.com to anti-patriarchal feminism is ridiculous, yet deforesting in the name of green-washing seems just as silly. 

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