I’ve been told that I am unmistakably a New Yorker, even now, three years after leaving the city for Oregon. It has to do with a certain intensity, I think, and also how fast I walk. At first, it was a stain I couldn’t scrub out, a reminder of my complicated feelings about moving from Brooklyn to Corvallis, a college town where the local population was eclipsed by the number of students who came and went with the seasons. My boyfriend and I had come west so I could attend graduate school, but we’d also been lured out here by the promise of living in closer proximity to what we understood to be nature. Our first weekend in Corvallis, we drove our bikes down to Crater Lake and cycled around its rim through wildfire haze. Later, we hiked and climbed the copper cliffs of Smith Rock. We skied through the generous powder of the Cascades. Still, there were compromises, like the winters that were characterized by endless rain and the skies that dimmed before 4:00 p.m. and the general smallness of the town. But it seemed wrong, like punching down, to criticize Corvallis. Anyway, I was exhausted by the city: its smells, sounds, pavement, heat, cruelty. I wanted to leave. And here, we thought, was nature.
We moved into a rental house—our landlord called it a “cottage,” but after our 700-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, it felt palatial—with neighbors who raised chickens. A few blocks away was a derelict lot that looked as though, at one point, someone had maintained a garden there: a grape vine wrapped up a tree overhanging the sidewalk, dangling greenish pearls of fruit over the heads of passersby. Canes of Himalayan blackberry arced over the fence. In the summer heat, overripe berries dripped off of their stalks, catching on their own thorns as they fell to the ground and turning the canes sticky and red-stained. One afternoon, I collected three pounds of them. I spent the next day standing over the stove concocting various blackberry potions, my kitchen filled with the scent of scorched sugar.
Then, two years after arriving in Oregon, we moved to Portland. We were city people again. On our first weekend in our new neighborhood, I went for a long run, looping through a nearby rose garden and trotting down a busy boulevard. Cresting a hill, I spotted a tree with mitten-shaped leaves sprouting from the patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the street. It was a fig. I pulled a bruise-purple fruit from a branch, and it was so heavy and ripe it began to split in my fingers. It was sweet. And it was, in a sense, natural—a complicated term that I now knew enough to start rethinking. I had a stupid lightbulb moment right then: Perhaps my interest in foraging was also about rethinking my notions of where I could find nature. I was embarrassed by how flimsy and trite my ideas about what constituted nature appeared. Maybe it wasn’t something to locate over there, and it wasn’t only undisrupted wild space; it was here, in the city, too. It crept up on me.
In early 2013, Ethan Welty and Caleb Phillips began developing an app based on maps they’d created of fruit trees in Boulder, Colorado. They used a combination of crowdsourced and publicly available data, and their own knowledge, expanding their catalogue to other regions—in Toronto, for example, they imported the city’s official tree inventory, adding nearly 700,000 trees and shrubs. After its release that March, it continued to expand into other regions. Austin city officials approached Welty and Phillips about adding their city’s trees to the map. And in the past year, a devoted user in Vietnam has logged around 250 sites.
I downloaded Falling Fruit shortly after the fig and right before I recruited a friend to a series of fruit-finding walks. Together, we charted a course through side streets in North Portland based on points I saw on the map. I carried a small cardboard box as we walked, filling it with apples, pears, Italian plums. On one September afternoon, we spotted a pile of cucumbers and zucchinis on a low wall outside of a house, a surplus from someone’s home garden. We saw little red bulbs stellating like fireworks from a tree and thought they must be poisonous, they were so vibrant and alien. But when we consulted a fruit-identifying app, we discovered that the tree was a kousa dogwood, whose berries were edible. They were too fragile to transport, so we stood next to the tree and popped them into our mouths, trying to articulate their flavor. Despite all the analogues we tested out, we could only agree that the fruit tasted like itself.
In the fall, I spoke with Welty from Zurich, where he’s now a postdoctoral fellow at the World Glacier Monitoring Service, because I wanted to understand how foraging was beginning to reframe my own relationship with the place where I lived. More than a decade after creating Falling Fruit, he remains an avid forager. Lately, he told me, his daughter had gotten into medlars—challenging, rock-hard brown fruits covered in a light fur, which are ready to be picked around the first frost and require weeks of fermentation in a cool, dark space to become edible. He told me that in the course of scouring his neighborhood for anything edible, he’d cultivated “a more tangible relationship” with the place where he lives. I recognized this idea, after months of finding my way around my neighborhood through its plants: the persimmons growing down the block; the lemon balm and peppermint that had escaped a backyard herb garden and proliferated along the sidewalk a few streets over.
He observed that many plants growing within built environments were put there by humans, and largely for aesthetic, rather than practical, purposes. It made me think of Central Park, the closest thing New York has to a wilderness space, which is in fact a neatly circumscribed 843-acre rectangle containing eight artificial lakes and ponds. (Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park; his son, John Charles Olmsted, first conceived Portland's Forest Park.) It felt faintly subversive, then, to find an alternate purpose for the landscape: not to look at, but to reach out and touch. To take. It felt like I was putting myself back into my environment.
“It’s extractive, maybe,” Welty admitted. “But there’s also a lot of beauty in those relationships.”
There are three tenets of urban foraging. One: don’t harvest too much. Two: use what you take. Three: minimize your impact. My own ethics were largely vibes-based; I never harvested anything that seemed wrong to pick. I knew other people had been foraging long before me, and I wanted to understand how my own practice fit into a larger history. In part, I was afraid that I was doing it wrong.
Peter Michael Bauer teaches a course on foraging ethics at Rewild Portland, the nonprofit he founded in 2010. In addition to the three core principles, he likes to instruct his students to forage invasives and plant natives in their place. “If we consume everything in the environment without giving back, we deplete the environment,” he told me. “We want people to see themselves more as stewards and gardeners.”
At first, gardening appears at odds with rewilding—what could be less wild than a garden? And yet that’s exactly what rewilding is. Rewilding involves the active selection of native flora and fauna and resembles gardening more than it does letting nature run its course. As Michael Pollan writes in Second Nature, “Mere neglect won’t bring back ‘nature.’” The plants that naturally take over a disrupted environment, like a derelict city block, tend to be weeds and invasives. “A city is potentially one of the most domesticated environments that exists,” Bauer told me. “At the same time, because the city has a lot of imported plants, there’s actually a lot of diversity of plant life.” (Of course, while rewilding is gardening, not all gardening is rewilding; the planting of natives is key.)
Himalayan blackberries, for example, were brought over for cultivation from eastern Europe in the 19th century. Now, they’re invasive; they can—and do—swiftly grow out of control. AAs if by magic, anywhere their canes touch the ground they shoot out roots, which grow deep enough to tap into the water far inside the earth, tiding them over during the long dry summers. They’re resilient to wildfires. They are remarkably adapted to this region—they thrive on highway medians and in undeveloped lots, those liminal spaces created and then abandoned by people, because they grow quickly and thrive on sunlight and neglect.
Blackberries “can kind of crowd out anything—even cars and buildings and parking lots,” said Amanda Davis, who studies berries as a faculty research assistant at Oregon State University. “There’s quite a bit of native habitat that has been overtaken by the blackberry. They’re just everywhere.” She pointed out that a species of blackberry is native to the region and was an important first food for local Indigenous people; its habitat has also been compromised by the Himalayan blackberry.
I realized I had still been thinking about the boundary between domestication and wildness all wrong. Edible plants did not, in fact, represent an unexpected persistence of wildness between stretches of concrete. They represented an ecological harm, but one that we can’t possibly undo. So then the question becomes: How do you participate in this world? The lesson foraging promised was growing messy. It wasn’t merely that urban landscapes are also, in some sense, natural environments, but that at this point, every natural environment is also one that we have engineered. There are, of course, meaningful differences between what is wild and what is cultivated, but the categories now appeared more elastic than I’d recognized.
I opened Falling Fruit and zoomed in on my home address. There they were: the row of American chestnuts that had been spitting fruits out of their spiky green seed pods into the gutter and onto the roof of my car. At dusk, I looked out the window and saw the silhouette of a person scooping fallen nuts into a bucket.
In my kitchen, I trepanned a bowl of chestnuts I’d harvested earlier that day, carving a big x across them that would allow steam to escape as they roasted. I pulled them out of the oven and peeled the shells back, revealing the brainlike creases of the meat. It was harder work than I expected. I bathed them in butter and cinnamon sugar, and my boyfriend and I sat over the bowl, eating one and then the next and then the next until they were gone.
A few days later, I emailed Portland’s urban forestry department to find out when and why the chestnuts had been planted. They had no record of their origins.
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