Foraging for Wild Garlic in Early Spring

The First Green of the Year

There is a moment in late February or early March when the woods begin to smell of garlic before you have seen a single leaf. Wild garlic, Allium ursinum — ramsons, as it is called in many parts of the country — pushes up through damp leaf litter while the trees above are still bare, and for a few short weeks it carpets whole acres of woodland floor in bright, soft green.

It is one of the most rewarding things a forager can gather. It is abundant, easy to identify once you know the smell, and it grows in quantities that make it genuinely useful in the kitchen rather than a garnish-sized curiosity. It also arrives at exactly the moment when the stored root vegetables are running out and the garden has nothing to offer but purple sprouting broccoli, which makes it doubly welcome.

Where to Look

Wild garlic likes damp, shaded ground with a soil that stays cool and moist through the year. Ancient woodland is the classic habitat, particularly where beech, oak or ash grow on heavy clay or along a stream bank. You will also find it along shaded lanes, in the lee of old hedgerows, on the edges of churchyards and in the dingly corners of large gardens where it has quietly naturalised.

• Look on north-facing slopes and in the shade of trees, not in open sunny fields.
• Follow the damp — stream banks, ditches, the bottom of a coombe or dingle.
• It often grows alongside bluebells, though the bluebells come a few weeks later.
• Southern and western counties tend to see it first; northern and upland sites may be a fortnight or more behind.

If you find a good patch, remember it. Wild garlic returns to the same ground year after year and spreads steadily, so a reliable spot is worth keeping in the notebook.

Telling Wild Garlic from Its Lookalikes

This is the part that matters, because two of its lookalikes are seriously poisonous and both come up at the same time. The single reliable test is the smell: crush a leaf between your fingers and it should smell unmistakably of garlic. If it does not, leave it alone.

• Wild garlic: soft, lance-shaped leaves, bright green and slightly glossy, usually two or three to a plant, growing from a bulb below ground. The stem is slender and the leaves droop and flop rather than standing stiffly upright.
• Lily of the valley: similar leaves, but they tend to come in pairs from a single stem and have a matt, slightly ribbed appearance. Crush one and there is no garlic smell at all. Every part is poisonous.
• Autumn crocus: broad, upright, strap-like leaves appearing in spring, without a garlic scent. Highly toxic.
• Young lords-and-ladies: arrow-shaped rather than lance-shaped, and again no garlic smell.

The leaves of wild garlic are also softer and more pliable than any of these. When in doubt, leave it. There is always another patch.

Picking Well and Picking Legally

Pick only the leaves, never the bulb. Lifting a bulb kills the plant outright and, in Scotland particularly, uprooting a wild plant without the landowner's permission is an offence. Picking leaves, flowers and fruit for your own use is generally permitted, but you need permission to gather anything on private land, and you should avoid nature reserves, sites of special scientific interest and any verge that looks as though the council has been along it with a sprayer.

Take a pair of scissors and a basket or cotton bag. Cut one or two leaves from each plant, working across a patch rather than stripping any one clump, and take no more than you will honestly use in a week. Wash everything when you get home and check carefully for ticks and for the sort of contamination that dogs leave behind on popular paths.

In the Kitchen: Soup, Pesto and Butter

Wild garlic is at its best raw or barely cooked. Heat destroys the colour and much of the perfume, so treat it more like spinach than like an onion.

For soup, soften a chopped onion and a diced potato in butter, add a litre of light stock, and simmer until the potato collapses. Then take it off the heat and stir in a large handful of shredded leaves. Blend immediately, season, and finish with a swirl of cream. The soup should be a vivid green.

For pesto, blitz 100g of leaves with 50g of toasted hazelnuts or walnuts, 50g of grated hard cheese, a squeeze of lemon and enough rapeseed oil to loosen it. It keeps for a week in the fridge under a layer of oil and freezes beautifully in ice cube trays.

For wild garlic butter, beat 50g of very finely chopped leaves into 250g of softened unsalted butter with the zest of a lemon and a good pinch of salt. Roll it in cling film, chill it, and slice it over new potatoes, fish or a grilled steak.

Buds, Flowers and Preserving the Harvest

The flower buds appear in April and can be picked and pickled in the same way as capers — a spoonful of them lifts a plate of cold meat or a creamy cheese. The open white star flowers are lovely scattered raw over salad or a risotto, and they make a surprisingly good flavoured vinegar if you pack them into a jar and cover them with white wine vinegar for a fortnight.

To keep leaves through the year, blanch them for thirty seconds, refresh in iced water, squeeze them dry and freeze in small portions. You can also blitz them with sea salt and dry the mixture on a tray in a very low oven to make a wild garlic salt that will carry the taste of early spring right through to winter.