Nature's bounty

Autumn foraging is on the agenda as Neil and Serena Cross venture out to gather woodland and hedgerow produce, from sloes to penny buns and chanterelles

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NDC I was fortunate to have an enlightened teacher at prep school who encouraged us to engage with nature. Being utterly hopeless in most academic arenas, the option of keeping a bird-table diary (like a gamebook, but less terminal) and being asked to bring in recently expired specimens to be examined on the ‘nature table’ were my salvation. I’ll never forget the excitement of her handing me a freshly roadkilled tawny owl to practise my schoolboy taxidermy. The end product was not a success but it taught me much about the physiology of a creature I’d only seen fleetingly when mobbed by small birds and which I considered to be enormously exotic.

One of this teacher’s great passions was fungi, or ‘flowerless plants’ as we were instructed to call them. This enthusiasm infected me powerfully as an eight year old and remains with me to this day. In those far-off days before risk assessments existed, we were sent off into the woods to forage for mushrooms and then triage them in the classroom into the edible pile, the inedible pile and the instant death pile. It taught me both to respect and admire the bewildering variety and potency of mushrooms and to appreciate the fact that there existed a whole world of gastronomic pleasure away from the generic button mushroom.