The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [57]
“Nope, it’s not sassafras,” the Wildman said.
“Cinnamon?” someone else guessed.
“Nope, it’s not cinnamon, either,” the Wildman said again. “Does anyone else have a guess?”
Everyone in the group sucked thoughtfully but shook their heads.
“It’s wintergreen. Or winter mint. It comes from this plant,” he told us. “Now, the important thing about this one is that it’s also a mild pain reliever. If you chew on the stems a little, like this”—he demonstrated, with characteristic cartoonishness—“you get a mild dose of natural pain relievers. Also, if you steep it in tea, it’s especially good for women around that time of the month.”
A bunch of women on the tour immediately began twisting stems off the tree.
“Since it’s a natural and safe alternative to aspirin, it’s also good for kids and babies. When Violet was teething, she used to chew on this,” the Wildman went on.
Since I love the flavor of wintergreen, I was a little bit more excited about steeping it in tea or something else to add flavor than about trying to cure my headaches with it. Though this was good to know as well—maybe I could cure a headache with a bowl of wintergreen ice cream sometime soon.
I had a question on my mind that I’d been trying to form the words for. I stepped up to Wildman as he was in the process of twisting a particularly toothsome branch apart, and asked him why all these plants, which were so great for eating or for other purposes, weren’t mass-grown but only found in the wild.
“Well, because back when people decided to domesticate plants, they only picked some, and that was that, and the rest became weeds, and now we never think of them as food!” he replied. He’d shot this out so quickly, while tucking some of the birch into his fanny pack and getting ready to lead the group on down the path, that I felt like I had just asked the most obvious question in the world. His words made perfect sense, though, and at least now, the whole explanation seemed obvious.
As we were walking along the trail away from the black birch tree, the Wildman looked more closely at a bush next to it.
“Ah, this is a raspberry bush,” he declared. “The raspberries won’t grow until late June, though. So remember where it is—that’s easy, it’s pretty close to the Boathouse, just down the path a bit from it.” I took careful note of this on my pad.
Just as with trash diving, there is some fine print associated with the act of foraging plants from the park. This was the subject of the Wildman’s most drawn-out yarn of the day, told with a mix of wry sarcasm and bravado. It’s against the law to “harm” the plants of New York City’s public parks, and that meant Prospect Park, Central Park, and almost all the parks where he gives walking lectures on wildlife. In 1986, an inflamed New York City Parks Department held a sting operation to smoke him out. Evidently on a mission of epic pettiness (this was during the height of New York City crime), two park rangers dressed in plain clothes attended one of Brill’s tours of Central Park, taking extensive photos and eventually calling for backup. Steve Brill was arrested, handcuffed, booked, and slapped with numerous charges. The story spread throughout all the major news channels and newspapers. NATURALIST ARRESTED FOR EATING A DANDELION, the headlines read. The parks department soon realized it had a PR disaster on its hands. But within a few weeks, they came to an agreement with Brill: They would drop the charges and allow Brill to continue giving his nature sessions in public parks under a set of sensible guidelines, mostly for the sake of the tour-goers’ safety. Since then, he’s taught hundreds of New Yorkers about the plants in their city’s backyard.
As we were nearing the entrance to the park at Grand Army Plaza, having made a half circle of the park through winding paths, we passed a field of tulips.
“Don’t pick those,” he said to one toddler, who was eyeing them. “They’re not perennials, so that’s it if you take them.”
The Wildman went on to explain that all of the plants we were harvesting that day