Hello, I'm Christophe de Hody from Paris and for over the past 10 years I've been
facilitating wild plants walks and workshops to
share my love for nature and spread knowledge about edible and
medicinal plants and mushrooms. I founded 'Le Chemin de la Nature' or in
english 'The Path of Nature' in order to provide online
training in botany, foraging, wild plant cooking and
herbalism. Even the most common plants around us
are no longer familiar to us, many of the plants that people call
weeds, and are desperately trying to get rid of,
actually are very useful. Our environment has a lot to offer and I
would love to share a little glimpse of it with you in this video.
We are in the Bois de Vincennes, one of the largest parks in Paris,
right in my backyard where there are many things to discover and eat.
I'm going to show you a few edible wild plants that you can find in all of
Europe and most of North America. There is no need to go very far to find some
plantain. Here we have the narrowleaf plantain,
Plantago lanceolata, which can be easily recognized by its
narrow-shaped leaves and palpable parallel veins.
You can harvest the young leaves all year round, they have a subtle mushroom
taste that's quite lovely. When the flower stalk appears
don't miss the flower birds, they are delicious!
In addition to being edible it's also medicinal
and contains anti-allergy and anti-inflammatory substances,
that's why you can use it as a poultice for insect bites
and why it's also traditionally used internally
to help relieve bronchitis and allergies. Plantains
are also a bio indicator of a nutrient-balanced soil, where there are
many of them it might give you a hint about where
best to start a vegetable garden. Do you recognize this one? It's dandelion,
perhaps the most iconic weed even though it's completely edible
from its fruits to its flowers. The name dandelion
is an adaptation of 'dents de lion' in French which literally means
'lion tooth' because of the shape of the edge of the leaves.
Its leaves can be eaten raw, in salad, or cooked
and so can it stem and flowers. When the flowers
are still flower buds we can make them into capers in vinegar,
or fry them. The flowers can be used as an ingredient for the very famous
jam from the Franche-Comté area of France called 'la cramaillotte, if you want to try it
here's a recipe. You can pause the video when you want to
make it.
As for dandelion roots you can eat them as well
mashed, grilled or fried, and can use them as a coffee substitute, very useful for
brewing your own local coffee if you don't happen to have coffee trees
growing around you. Here's a place where you wouldn't want
to fall down but what you can have is plenty of nettles, careful it stings!
If you have never tasted it before I strongly encourage you to overcome your
fear of the nettle sting. The only way to make sure not to get
stung is to wear thick gloves. Alternatively,
you can try picking the leaf from below then rolling it like this, and
then you can eat it raw. Otherwise, nettle leaves are delicious in
soup, in salad if you chop them finely, in pestos,
you can even prepare nettle bread using dry nettle leaf powder.
Nettle is very nutritious and contains most of the nutrients we need in our
nutrition: minerals, vitamins, etc. In spring
its leaves can even contain up to 40 % of its dry weight in protein,
that's why nettle is traditionally used for its remineralizing properties
and for the prevention of musculoskeletal pain,
inflammation, such as rheumatism. The nettle root is also quite interesting as
a traditional remedy for prostate disorders for men.
And if we zoom out to look at the bigger picture nettles are crucial for
biodiversity, they host numerous insects and small
animals which seek shelter among their stinging
leaves. By doing so they avoid being bothered by
small mammals and also big ones like me.
Here is a plant you should recognize easily: the common daisy,
Bellis perennis, is much more than just a pretty plant.
It is also edible and can add some color to your salads.
Just like the dandelion buds daisy buds can be prepared like capers
following this recipe.
In a macerated oil common daisies also make a wonderful skin-firming
remedy. It was traditionally applied to aging skin
to help it strengthen. You could potentially confuse the common daisy
with the oxeye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare, which is much bigger, also edible and
even more delicious. Here's another interesting plant and
a very abundant one. This one is called garlic mustard,
Alliaria petiolata, here at the seed stage. It's not
a plant from the garlic family but from the cabbage and mustard family.
If you crumple its leaves you will smell a subtle scent of garlic,
and you can, of course, use it for cooking, preferably raw.
Its roots, harvested in autumn, have a great wasabi taste.
In springtime you can peel the stems and eat them raw,
they are deliciously sweet. Finally, each seed can be harvested
at the end of spring, beginning of summer, and ground to make your own homemade
mustard. It's a delicious plant!
Do you recognize this tree? There are several species of linden trees both in
Europe and in the States and all of them are completely edible.
The leaves have a nice subtle taste and can be eaten
raw for most of the spring season in salad,
or cooked and also dried to be used as a flower
mixed with others. The flowers make excellent
herbal tea and the seeds are very rich in healthy lipids.
Environmentally speaking its flowers, rich in nectar and pollen, are essential
to many pollinators. Just by stopping by a
linden tree in the end of spring and listening, there
are so many insects it feels like the tree itself is
buzzing. It's important to protect our trees both
in the forest and in the city, they act as important carbon traps, they
protect us from overheating and they are shelters for
biodiversity. By cultivating trees more consciously we
could increase the surface area available for growing food, food on
many levels from the ground well into the air.
Perhaps this will become one of the solutions for feeding the whole planet
in the future. You see, wild plants are treasures and
you can find them everywhere, even in cities. But of course
foraging comes with risk. If you eat the wrong plants you might
end up in a hospital somewhere. But with a little bit of learning
anyone can start bit by bit. There are plenty of possibilities for getting
started: field trips with botanists and
professional foragers, identification and foraging books and, of
course, hundreds of Youtube videos created by passionate people just like
us. I truly believe that if we all gain more
knowledge about nature we will love it more and we will make more efforts to
preserve its biodiversity. I hope you enjoyed this video,
thanks for watching!