Urban Wild Foraging–Walk with Me, a One-Mile Radius

Abstract

Dilafruz Williams takes us on a journey of a one-mile radius where she lives, exposing a rich tapestry of trees, shrubs, herbs, and trailing vines that grace side-walks, city parks, and college campus grounds offering their bounties of food in various shapes, textures, smells, colors, and tastes. She also points to other gifts from her plant relatives: dyes for fabric and medicines for healing and health. Part memoir, she invites us to “notice” with all our senses as she narrates her own experiences of walking and wild foraging in Portland, Oregon, where she has lived for almost thirty years. Paying attention also means being in relationship with birds, insects, and animals with whom these plants are at home. Needing neither a paper map nor a google portal map, walking the streets, observing, listening, and remembering, she gets to know her place intimately. The web of life of which she is a part, instills deep understanding about relationships with place; no television screen or computer monitor can ever compete with real-life teachings and intricacies of embodied learning. As we walk with her to wild forage, we can feel the bounties of her place: hazelnut, oak, walnut, linden, cedar, douglas fir, pine, apple, cherry, fig, persimmon, plum, aroniaberry, blackberry, marionberry, serviceberry, blueberry, grape, Oregon grape, salal, stinging nettle, rosemary, wild mint, oregano, and fennel, are among the more than one hundred plants that she visits in friendship.