Forage – Stop to smell the flowers… then eat them, too?

Forage for your food, lately, or too scared to pick your own? There’s a whole world of edible plants growing around us, but if the closest you’ve ever been to foraging for food is scrumping apples (or more recently, scrabbling at the red-stickered items in your supermarket’s Reduced section), you need this beautiful book…

Yes, it’s another book we’ve eagerly added to our Fragrant Reads shelves, but although the publishers of Forage: Wild Plants to Gather and Eat say ‘Anybody can enjoy the increasingly popular back-to-nature activity of foraging’, the truth is, very few of us feel confident enough to start picking some of the foliage we see on our daily walks. Thanks to author Liz Knight’s clear descriptions, and the stunning botanical illustrations of Rachel Pedder-Smith, the identification is made far easier and reading this, you’ll really feel encouraged to explore and diversify with wild ingredients.

What’s more, it’ll certainly make you look at flowers in a different way. From honeysuckle cordial (which sounds like something the fairies would drink in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), pickled cherry blossoms, linden leaf madeleines, dandelion petal cake to damson and rose petal preserves, the accompanying recipes sound like a feast for all the senses.

 

Forage: Wild Plants to Gather and Eat by Liz Knight, illustrated by Rachel Pedder-Smith [Laurence King Publishing]
Buy it at Waterstones

There’s such an elegant and understated confidence to Forage, and no wonder – Liz has a wealth of experience, having spent years learning the ways of foraging, founded Forage Fine Foods – a business she runs from her kitchen in rural Herefordshire – where she teaches courses on foraging and cooking wild ingredients, and also sells some delicious foodie finds. You may also have seen her appearing on the eight-part series of Channel 5’s Escape to the Farm with presenter Kate Humble. But if you’ve the idea that Liz was born in the bosom of the country and learned such skills at her mother’s knee, it certainly didn’t come naturally.

 

 

‘I grew up in normal street in a normal town just outside London,’ says Liz, and it turns out she gradually grew to love freshly picked food having tasted the tomatoes from a neighbour’s greenhouse, and later, worked in care homes and talked to the older residents. Explains Liz:

‘These people knew food; they taught me how to make butter, what cuts of meat to buy and how to cook it, what leaves to nibble on and what food should really taste like…Thanks to them I got a fire in my belly about the wild, wonderful food of Britain and that fire turned into Forage.’

Nowadays we’re becoming used to seeing ‘foraged food’ celebrated on menus of fine dining restaurants, but really Liz wants everyone to feel confident enough to try their hand at picking ingredients growing wild locally. Because Liz’s life now truly is spent searching the local hedgerows in search of scrumptious finds, and we’re sure reading this book will sew some more seeds of the passion for foraging. Now you won’t only want to stop to smell the roses (and wild cherry blossom, linden trees, honeysuckle, gorse…) but eat them (once safely identified!) too.

By Suzy Nightingale

Explore the stunning new scent & watch the gorgeous new film

Gucci have been blowing us away with their fabulously opulent catwalk collections, and now continue that trend with the launch of their sumptuous new scent, Gucci Bloom
The first fragrance developed under the complete control of Gucci’s Creative Director, Alessandro Michele, this is a lusciously modern white floral we couldn’t wait to get our noses on.
Alessandro Michele says: ‘I wanted a rich white floral fragrance, a courageous scent that transports you to a vast garden filled with many flowers and plants, a bouquet of abundance. The garden is as beautiful as women are; colourful, wild, diverse, where there is everything. Gucci Bloom smells of this garden in order to travel to a place that is not there.’
So what does it smell like? Well it’s gloriously soaring right from the first spritz, with the mysterious scent of the (exclusive to Gucci, as far as we know) note of Rangoon Creeper – a white flower that only opens at dusk, gradually transforming to pink and finally a deep, blood red. A sparkling bouquet of tuberose and juicy jasmine garland the fragrance throughout, before soft musk slowly rolls in to billow beguilingly…
Now, feast your eyes on the eye-poppingly gorgeous mini-film – and if the sun’s not shining where you are right now, we’re sure you’ll feel a virtual glow.

Gucci Bloom from £52 for 30ml eau de parfum
Buy it at Harrods
Written by Suzy Nightingale

Which are the most fragrant roses on earth? Read our guide to a heavenly scented garden…

Is anything more disappointing than spotting a voluptuously gorgeous rose, cupping it gently in your hands and going in for the sniff… only to discover it’s completely without scent? Obviously we adore fragrance here at The Perfume Society, and roses just have to be in our Top Three Flowers Ever – so as part of our on-going celebrations we’d love to share with you a particularly fragrant feature on the very best scented roses you can grow, to make your garden smell like heaven on earth…
Written for us by Country Living Gardens editor, Stephanie Donaldson, The Most Fragrant Roses on Earth was previously an exclusive feature in our award-winning magazine, The Scented Letter… From interviews with the world’s top perfumers, a round-up of the latest launches you absolutely must sniff right now and a plethora of perfumed features – we have our finger firmly on the pulse to bring you all the news your nose should know.
Available in flickable-format online to subscribers, so many of you told us you were laboriously printing it out at home, page by page, that we listened and also made it available in a gorgeously glossy print version to satiate your scent-reading lusts (and save your printer cartridges!) In fact, we’re honoured to have readers worldwide, with the launch of our International Subscription, and now you can join the ever-growing throng to see the sort of thing you’ve been missing out on so far.
So, settle back with a cuppa and breathe in the heady scent of possibility for the rose garden of your dreams…




 
Written by Suzy Nightingale

Mid-week hump? We guarantee this will cheer you up! Man plants scent garden for blind wife, to make her smile again…

Tissues at the ready, because this is all just too lovely…

After his wife lost her sight at the age of 52 within just a week, following complications from diabetes, Mr Kuroki wondered what to do to make his beloved smile again. Locking herself away and living a life of seclusion after going blind, Mrs Kuroki was utterly distressed not to be able to enjoy the outdoor life she was so used to – the couple were dairy farmers in Shintomi Town, Miyazaki Prefecture in Japan, married since 1956 and working hard every day – a life that seemed lost to her, now.

Her husband thought that if he could perhaps tempt her outside again, if perhaps a few visitors might come every day, that her life would be improved. Little could he have known what a huge and lasing impact his next decision could have on both their lives…
husband-plants-flowers-blind-wife-kuroki-shintomi-2Vowing to connect his wife to the nature she so loved, Mr Kuroki set about picking a highly fragrant plant that she could enjoy smelling even though she couldn’t see the flowers anymore. With this in mind he began clearing the land, a process that took two years in all, eventually creating the perfect environment to grow a huge carpet of tiny pink flowers called ‘shibazakura’ in Japan, or more commonly known as phlox to us.

ScentgardenAs the buds began to bloom, word spread of their touching love story and the mass of colour and scent it inspired, ‘a few’ visitors has now, more than a decade after the first phlox was planted, become a must-see (and smell!) destination for up to an incredible 7,000 people on any one day, during the peak season of late March to April. What once were the cow sheds have now been transformed into an information building to house pictures of the couple and their story, and of some notable local dignitaries who have visited them. The couple often receive the visitors in person, and from the pictures, it certainly seems as though his wish came true:

Mrs Kuroki has a lot to smile about, now.

scentedgarden
Do have a look at the official website for more stunning pictures of this unashamedly heart-warming story – the text is all Japanese, and though we know of several readers who are fluent, here’s the all important address details for those of you who aren’t, and are planning a trip to Japan:

Miyazaki-ken, Koyu District, Shintomi, Nyuuta 17180-1
One teeny word of warning for people wishing to recreate this carpet of colour is that the scent of phlox is apparently quite similar to that of the cannabis plant – read more here – so we may be playing safe and enjoy looking at the pictures, or hopefully one day visiting in person, instead.

Written by Suzy Nightingale