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Gagliano, Monica. Thus Spoke the Plant: A remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientifc discoveries and personal ecounters with plants. North Atlantic Books., 2018.

Marder, Michael. Plant- Thinking A philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press., 2013.

Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press., 2016.

Oudolf, Piet, et Henk Gerritsen. Planting the Natural Garden. Timber Press., 2019.

Oudolf, Piet, et Noël Kingsbury. Planting A new Perspective. Timber Press., 2003.

Robinson, William. The Wild Garden. Timber Press, 2009.

Steiner, Rudolf, et G. Adams. Agriculture Course: The birth of the Biodynamic Method. Rudolf Steiner Press., 2004.

Vegetal Politics: Belonging, practices and places. Routledge., 2015.

Varda, Agnès. The Gleaners and I, 2000

Marguerite Humeau

The world stopped. We had to stay right wherever we were. 

Wherever we were we had to stand right there. 

I was standing right here 

and there was no place to go to. 

It was tough in the first weeks. 

Everything collapsed.

And then

I started to feel this urge to dig.

I want - to know - the territory - on which I stand on right now - really - really well.

So - I dig.

Lucia Stuart

Yes, certainly I can - I can try and condense it into how I became a forager, which is a strange mixing of everything that I love. I had an art background in fine art. And then I ran a cafe in France with some friends. I've got some photos since showed a year.

Marguerite Humeau
At a time?

Lucia Stuart

Yeah. So then I spent 10 years in France doing the cafe and. And that was rural France, which the reason I got reconnected to nature and we were, we were just finding food that was around us in this little village. And it was an old French boy that came in, a war veteran, and he came shuffling and he was a bit lonely. And he came shuffling in with plants every day and said, [ "Oh, j'ai ça de mon jardin"] - and so he came in every day with different plants. And gradually I started using them on the menu. And that really - you know - got me going.

Marguerite Humeau
I just started walking around.

I want to become a hunter gatherer,

so I hunt food in my neighbourhood.

There are soooo many plants

that we don’t even look at but that grow in profusion.

Dandelions,

daisies,

speedwells,

nettles...

and so many others that have names that I don’t even know.

Until now I’ve called them weeds or wild flowers.

In French we call a lot of those weeds [“mauvaises herbes”] , “bad weeds”.

Lucia Stuart

I remember there was a key phrase I heard, which was to name something is to love something, and I love nature like we will do. And I suddenly realized that actually who were these little plants? What were their names? And that was a sort of thing that triggered I must start learning them.

Marguerite Humeau
Because of intensive agriculture, and the spraying of field edges, and the reseeding of pastures,

those “bad weeds” have had to make their way to the fringes - out of our lives.

So I look for the overlooked, the abandoned beings, the ones that are everywhere but that we never notice.

Lucia Stuart
I look on it like a magic. So you've got normal food, like the basics. And then you want to make it magical. So if you make a ["tarte"] / tart -you know- you make it magical by sprinkling on. You pick it - you know - that kind of thing. Or you might flavor the pastry with the ground up seed. So I think what it is is it's - you know - eating normal food, but then adding in a third of magic.

Marguerite Humeau

Native plants from our lands have been marginalised like waste. They are swept away until they

disappear.

They are now in the ditches, on the roadsides, at the peripheries, borders and edges.

They are the last remnants

of the lands native populations of plants.

We have evacuated them from our lives because they are “wild”.

Lucia Stuart

I think. Yes, it is this key combining of - a key combining of who I am. I think it is me manifesting and in all the things that make me up. For instance, I do genuinely hate waste. And so we were just talking about- you know - the fact that there was all this food that's not eaten. You know, I don't like over consumption. I think I'm a bit rebellious. It's a way of saying I can survive without the world - you know - I don't need that. I aesthetically - you know - smell, taste, vision, you need to be extremely visual to do it. So I think, there I was being a chef, loving really good ingredients, and then walking on the beach and thinking, well, look, the seaweed must be eaten. It must be eatable. And then realizing that I kind of I could create your food from it. I mean, it's hard to define, really.

And also, I think I really like the idea of the niche things - things which no one else does - you know. I remember my stepfather saying early chair. Many people are popularizers, but you're an originator. And this idea of originating things that other people don't do. I think that's also very much me who I am. I've always done things people don't do. But like artists, we do things. And also like artists. You're trying to desperately to communicate vision and love. 

Marguerite Humeau 

We are so ignorant and we are sitting on piles and piles of delicious free food.

What if those bad weeds were wonder-weeds. A lot of them can heal, help us get better and

support our immune systems. That’s why I wanted to talk with Lucia.

Lucia Stuart

I think as a forager, you sort of want to welcome people into the in-depth world of plants and you have to say this is what they can do to people. Experts just say when the tide is out, the table is late. Seaweed down here is called Pepper Dulse, and it's very, very Pepper Dulse, it's very juicy at the moment and it's probably the most flavorful seaweed.

In the sea, it's floating. But at the moment, it's quite young. There's not very much of it. 

This is Dulse.

Marguerite Humeau

I learnt recently that in 1898 Rudolf Diesel had discovered a way to get a motor running with

vegetable oil including micro alga and groundnut. He had invented an infinite virtuous energy

circle that was abandoned and instead we started to use fossil fuels like petroleum.

Lucia Stuart

So it shoud be taking that back, putting it in the oven with a truffle oil and make it some seaweed crisps.

Yes. Yes. Yes. You can't help it because again, it's a bit like a painting. The more you have this material, the more you push it. I never stop finding out what it does to the plant. I'm just trying to count. My mind's gone. Gonna think of an example. The more I use these plants, the more I just think, oh, my goodness- you know - they're so - they keep on delivering. And even the color, for instance, back to the dandelion flowers, I thought I would cut off all the petals and then make a powder, a bright yellow powder. So I'm leaving the food to taste and going to the color. And then you could even capture the smell and then you can do the medicinal side. And it's just over.

I have been so many dandelion flowers the past two or three weeks, millions and millions of them. I've collected them for tea and these biscuits where I need 50 dandelion hats. This will be my last chance to collect them that we're all going to see now. You can actually see the reason they're home to so many insects now towards the end of their flowering, they get many more insects. But I shall get the last load.

Marguerite Humeau

Maybe we could talk about those ones that you love ‘cause I found them everywhere as well.

Lucia Stuart

Yeah, they're fantastic, aren't they. Yeah. So those are the ones I was cutting off the petals. And you're trying to make a powder yellow powder. But these, they're wonderful. They're incredibly medicinal. And they found out that the flowers are even more medicinal than the leaves, which is quite unusual in plants. And they did a thing where they wondered why cattle were going into a fields and eating, going straight to the flowers, you know, because cattle - you know - they might they wouldn't know the difference, would they? But actually, it is all the nutrients in there, and they just love their. So, yeah, those are wonderful. So those are the dandelion flowers heads, the little yellow heads.

Marguerite Humeau

I have had this thought about living my life, 

While constantly drawing a line 

between the Earth core and myself, 

as if I was attached to our planet inner centre. 

So I scan, I excavate,   

Or I simply listen to, 

everything that this line is going through: 

magma,

minerals, 

soil, 

roots, 

constructions, 

ancient knowledge,

and buried voices, 

past and future flowers, 

fossils, 

unofficial and unwritten histories,

unheard presences. 

Marguerite Humeau

So when you say medicinal, what exactly do they heal?

Lucia Stuart

They've got anti costergenic, anti inflammatory and anti viral. Yeah, but just about everything. I mean, I've literally got a book. I mean, there's nothing that plant doesn't do -you know- vitamins. I mean, literally just everything as a overall medicine cabinets. So when I was using them to cook with, I pick the flower heads and then I just put them in the mixer with flour, with white flour and just mixed into the flour. And then then I would make my best guess, put, you know, orange peel. I put a bit of orange peel and flavorings in that, because the flavor is honey ready. So what you could do right now, take off the flower heads, boil the kettle, pour boiling water from the kettle…

Marguerite Humeau

So do you keep the green thing?

Lucia Stuart

Yeah. You can do, the green gives a little bit of bitterness. The green is call receptacle. No, the sepal I think. So you can keep that on and just pour put maybe five or six in a glass. Boiling water over and leave it and then got tea. And that tea would be very soothing and would be a lovely thing to drink. And I've got a friend who's very ill with inflammation and I bought her a jar of these dried for her to take one glass a day, so they are great.

Beautiful big powers of fragrant lilac. Let's just come out. So I'm going to forage just a couple of branches of these hanging flowers.

Marguerite Humeau

That's what I was wondering is when you forage, do you mostly think about taste or do you also think about the specific properties of rich plants? And, for example, healing properties or other properties that they might have?

Lucia Stuart

I think about the big picture for us. Quite a big picture. And then, I mean, occasionally I'll go out thinking I need to have some nourishment because Cobus around some medicinal- you know. For instance, spring is a good example of thinking. Yes, I am going to think about health because we just had winter and some of the plants are very, very good for keep sort of nourishing us after winter like nettles. So occasionally I will gather for health. But I think in general, it's for a particular objective, like a wild food banquet or like storing for the freezer because of plants about to finish, like the garlic.

These are the flowers from the wild cabbage, and they taste very, very good. They taste like cabbage that's been sweetened. That's a fantastic flower, this one.

Marguerite Humeau

All plants indicate something about our Earth health condition. Docks and buttercups grow on asphyxiated soils, thistles show an excess of nitrite, reynoutria indicate heavy metals, tansies and groundsels grow from ashes; datura, euphorbia, hemlock, cocklebur feed on chemicals, synthetic products or fossil fuels. Some plants heal, others auscultate the soil and send us silent cries for help.

So those ones were everywhere?

Lucia Stuart

They are beautiful, yes.

Marguerite Humeau
And they're always funny for me because, you know, I'm call Marguerite and in French “marguerite” is like the bigger version of those and my brother to make fun of me when I was a kid, he called me "pâquerette" which is the name of those little one.

Lucia Stuart

Could you break one of the leave off and put it in your hand like that. So I can have a look. I wonder what... I think it is it is oxeye daisy. But it's in a kind of interim phase. I'm pretty sure. Oh yeah, that looks like it. Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure it's a Marguerite oxeye daisy. Yeah. And it'll they'll keep the thing is that plant is incredibly gross so much. I think it will keep growing. It'll grow up to. Yep. A big, big size. And then it really blows in the wind. But they are wonderfully edible. You could chop them up in salad.

Jack by the hedge - the leaf tastes of garlic and mustard.

And I think what it is, is you have to be really true to yourself. And so it just comes out. And I remember sometimes they said, " ah, it's nice to have a feminine side of foraging because you're foraging very feminine." And then some of them are very much tactical and technical and quite nerdy about mushrooms. And some of them are quite physical and they do pick barbecue. So with me, I'm definitely and I think my one is definitely a lot of drawing and visuals and it's mixed up with a lot, a lot of aesthetics my one. All of us foragers have a different approach. So yeah, I would describe my approach as very ascetic based. It's definitely got a French love of restraint, which I put down to France a wonderful way of preparing food with one ingredient. Many foragers, they just have all these plants and they make - I had a friend who made a powder, green powder with 150 different plants in the powder - that is what some of that would do, that extraordinary, you know. So but with me, I'd rather have one plant like Dandelion and do trillions of dishes with it, rather that way round. And I think that is a French way.

This is sea beet, which is a kind of king of wild spinach. Yes, it's very delicious. And when I always teach about the shininess of the leaf, then you can really see that here now how the sunlight bouncing off the leaf.

Marguerite Humeau

I resist

the denial

of our soil

as a living entity.

90% of beings, alive, on the planet, are in the soil.

Everything on the surface, plants and trees and everything else, is just a support system for the

soil to be kept alive.

We are also giant ecosystems,

our bodies are covered

and made of

other species

bacteria and other tiny organisms.

Flora and fauna - are- our bodies. That’s why we call it the human biome. We’re like the soil, a living organism that also needs to be explored.

Lucia Stuart
So that's some, that's sort of one of these things where we pick plants. We have to look at the shape of the stem and then it should be a little rich because those plants that it's a little bit over a dangerous family, that family of plants, because there's so many - well not dangerous - but it's just technically difficult, the umbrella. I wish I could chat of all the family of plants and benefits accordant. And it's enormous and there are not many, but there are a few toxic ones in that family. I'm pretty sure that it's a beautiful cow parsley. And when it is adequate, it should smell very lovely smell. If you break / open the stem - it's not the stem! - and inhale the fragrance is release. Is it smell lovely, sort of quite like sweet, a bit like that? Is it lovely?

Marguerite Humeau

Yeah. It's really nice.

Lucia Stuart

You see that's what I would do if you wanted to check if it was wild chervil. And then when it's young, you chop up that stem and eat it. 

Marguerite Humeau
During this time I became aware of the seasons and micro-seasons within them. One day elderflowers blossomed and a few weeks later they would die and leave space for ox-eye daisies to reveal themselves, they are the most precise calendar that has ever existed.

Lucia Stuart

Now that's called green alconut. And they believe that it came from monasteries in Europe because it was always found growing around monasteries. Possibly they used it for it die. Because the Latin names from ana. So that's kind of its early uses, but with me, I eat the blue flower. That is beautiful in salad. Beautiful. And also in ice cubes, I put these in ice cubes. And the other funny thing, Marguerite, was lost - yeah, I had a problem with my back and I was in bed and I always look at what's growing. I was staying in somebody's garden hut. And I looked round and they were everywhere. It was last May and I found out I looked up and therefore back healing. That's spring is in the back. Oh, that's incredible.

Marguerite Humeau

So you ate them to heal your back?

Lucia Stuart

Well, I rang another forager and I said - because they don't tell you how to eat it if you want to heal your back. It's nowhere - It just says exploring as well - and he said, "Oh, yeah. It's so frustrating" because you don't know how to use them. You know, as medicine, so the result was I didn't know. 

Marguerite Humeau

We humans when we are born

we are not completely formed,

so it means that the environment in which we live will constitute the rest of what is still to be

formed. We become it.

When we spray weed killers on food that we grow, the weedkiller is blocking the active principles

that allow them to be alive. These principles are called The shikimates.

We also produce shikimates and they also keep us alive.

So when we spray our food we spray ourselves.

We block ourselves from living.

We kill our hormones, our hair growth. We kill our sexual development, our blood circulation, we

kill our intestines, our nervous systems. We kill our heartbeats, we kill our ability to think. We are

dead.

Lucia Stuart

First of all, have a big smell. What's smell like, the rose?

Marguerite Humeau
It smells really good.

Lucia Stuart

Oh, good, good, good. Oh, good.

Marguerite Humeau

Not from far away but

Lucia Stuart

Oh yeah. Because you can't capture that if it's fragrant, it means there flavor there. So that's a good thing because some roses don't smell. So yeah, the next issue is whether they've had treatment from anything. But if there were a lot there in the park. I mean, again, it's kind of common sense. I don't think they looked like they had any sprays on them or anything. I don't know. Like, what do you feel like eating? There's several options if you use it very dry, you could make a sugar, ray sugar. Just how it then you could sprinkle that on whatever you like because that will last in the kitchen. Or you could take a nice yogurt with it and blend in and then you'd have a rose yogurt, that you could try soaking it in gin. So you could try the bottles up and then put. Try that!. Right. Have a plain bottle of gin and pull up, maybe take maybe three roses and put them in the gin and put the bottle in the sun and wait. I always say you can make rosewater for your skin, make your own rosewater by cutting it in water. Roses are fantastic. They're to do with beauty. Yeah. They've done ancient symbol of making us more beautiful. Yeah. That's the main thing. Beauty and sort of spiritual healing from the rose. Yes. Lovely. Lovely. I think it may be my favorite flower.

I think, again, we've got such an instinct. I have. I've got. It's interesting because this goes into astrology because my sign is Taurus - may - like you too Marguerite

Marguerite Humeau

No I am Capricorn. You get along well together Taurus and Capricorn.

Lucia Stuart

Well, we Taurus are notoriously safe. So, you know, everything we do is very safe. So I think like how we walk, how we you know, so I think I'm really safe. And I got the silver instinct. So to answer your question. It's a funny combination between things being very safe about what I eat, but also having this slightly again, of if is poison, I've lived well, like - you know- the wild oysters, I eat it from the sea. Loads, I I love them. And I thought, we'll see one day there is a virus or something that goes into the sea. I don't know. Something anti ecological spill. I sometimes I think, the day that the land is that polluted is today, I don't want to live, that kind of thing. It's almost that connection.

So it’s the 30th of April and the Hawthorn tree is about to have again the flowers. This flower is for May blossom.

I could smell this May blossom before I could even see the trees. This huge aroma of almond. And it starts smelling like almond. 

I'll tell you what I'm gonna be doing tomorrow. Going out. Picking it like this. And I'll be breaking up little bits like that and then pushing them to dry. And then I will have a big jarre, which will be tea, throughout the year. Make it just again, you put a handful in a pot and have tea. And medicinally, this is very, very good for the heart. Every heart, if you have see the berries and the leaves, it's good for the blood. And if you have the flowers and the leaves, it's good for the emotions.

This feels like the perfect tree, too. And foraging with huge significance and optimism and joy and love is brought by this tree. It's the tree of the heart.

Marguerite Humeau
Weeds don’t need looking after, they don’t need pruning or watering, they are robust, hardy and militant, and if we humans were to cease to be, they would reclaim their territory at an astonishing speed. They appear in the cracks of the slab that has been poured over Earth and will soon fully emerge from it with vigour and grace.