I'm making note of the plants I can eat in the place I live. There's not as much in Lincoln as you could find in some areas of Kent, but there's still some lovely plants to be found.
There's raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb in my back garden. Nettle seems to grow well too (haha). My front garden has ispaghula; the seed husks can be eaten. They have a nice texture and I have a recipe using them with some orange to make an excellent dessert. A relative of ispaghula, common plantain, also grows in my front garden. There's also dandelions. The flowers make very nice tea, the leaves are great when lightly boiled and the roots can be used as an alternative to coffee when well-roasted. I like to roast them until they're well-cooked yet still pale on the inside. Lightly roasted dandelion roots an ideal snack.
There are blackberries all over the place I live in, often accompanied by several elder trees. They're in the fields close to where I live, in many places along the River Witham and in liquorice park at the top of the hill in town (the place where I live is surrounded by hills formed by a glacier).
Liquorice park is a wonderful place to find things to eat. There's damsons and greengages, there's apples and pears. You can find raspberries there, too. Close by to the main entrance at the top (liquorice park is on the side of the hill) is a collection of herbs such as sage and thyme. While walking down the path once, my mum pointed out what she thought was horseradish. An information sign at the bottom entrance to the park confirmed this.
In the fields close to where I live, wheat fields occupy the shallow foot of the hills. I don't eat gluten (a story for my next blog post, maybe) so I can't eat any wheat plants that stray onto the surrounding grassy paths. However, I can eat the other cereal which can be found in several locations along the edge of the wheat fields - oats! There's also plantain at the top of the wheat fields. Where the shallow foot of the field abruptly becomes steeper, there is a good number of wild rose (aka dog rose). The flowers (not edible, I don't think) are lovely and the rosehips can be made into a wonderful syrup. The flavour of this syrup has similarities to apple, with a delightful tone of vanilla. Although if the syrup is at this stage you run the risk of it being undercooked, which definitely won't be great for your tongue! The seeds inside a rosehip have a fine, fur-like coating which is rather irritant to the skin and mouth.
From the fields I can find a path which leads to what remains of the old orchard. Along this path are some very large and flavoursome blackberries, so it's one of my favourite picking sites! Due to the fact that the orchard once covered this path, you can find a few long forgotten apple trees. I think there might be a pear tree or two, as well.
There's also a cobnut tree along the way. It reminds me a little of the small hazel forest that is/was (I have no idea if it's still there) in one corner of my primary school's playing field. I used to take hazelnuts home with me once the shells turned brown and store them in a sparkly jewellery box my sister gave me, along with an almond which to this day I still haven't managed to open! The almond tree was outside of my primary school, only thirty seconds away from the gates. Seeing as it is growing in England, it grows very slowly and only has a few almonds each year if it's lucky. It's hardly grown since I left primary school five years ago!
Talking about the almonds and hazelnuts has reminded me of the walnut tree and chestnut trees on the way back home from primary school. There were several chestnut trees, meaning that we always got plenty of them. We collected them in autumn and my mum roasted them in winter, around about Christmas time. I remember my mum roasting three or four trays of chestnuts on Christmas day, and they all had that sweet, nutty flavour and the soft, sometimes crumbly texture. It's strange that the only memory of that Christmas I have is eating chestnuts, and of my sister complaining when she got a bad chestnut! I'm quite sure that my mum made a chestnut stuffing. I guess that counts as another memory! I'm quite sure that was the same year we collected at least five baskets full of walnuts. We let them mature and started eating them in winter, too.
I was talking about the old orchard before I got side-tracked by those memories! Well then...in the small area left of the orchard, nearly every single apple tree and pear tree has a label on it (a few trees accidentally lost theirs!) informing you on the variety of the plant, when the variety was brought to Lincoln and where it originated from. As well as many, many old varieties of apple and pear, the orchard is home to a number of damson trees and even a quince tree! It's also quite a good area to spot wildlife. There are plenty of bunnies, for example, and in summer dragonflies and damselflies. My school sits over where part of the orchard used to be, and you can spot two large cooking apple trees at the front entrance; one is next to the entrance gate and the other is next to the exit gate.
My mum used to have a shop at the lawns (which is not far away from liquorice park. It's also behind Lincoln Castle.) In the lawns is a place called the John Dawber gardens. There are wild strawberries everywhere here. There's also a large blackcurrant bush next to one of the entrances. Embarrassingly, I didn't notice this until I went back to visit the place with my best friend last Tuesday. I think I have a vague memory of noticing it one day, now that I think about it, but even then I only noticed it one time before! There's a few apple trees close to the blackcurrants - don't worry, I noticed them! At the other end of the garden is an incredibly old variety of raspberry. This variety is so old that it's almost unrecognisable as a raspberry plant. The leaves are dark and glossy, and the fruits have quite a different taste to the raspberries you're probably used to.
In the lawns there was an awe-striking conservatory full of amazing plants brought back to Lincoln by Sir Joseph Banks. I loved that place very much and I spent hours upon hours there, especially while my mum's shop was open. It was a beautiful place, but the council decided to knock it down and extend the car park. The car park was hardly used before the extension and from what I've seen, that hasn't changed! Anyway, enough of focusing on the negative, and back to sharing the details of the wonderful plants this place contained! In one corner, I remember my mum pointing out to me the great, long leaves of banana plants. However, thanks to inadequate care there were only a few banana plants left by the time my mum opened up her shop. One of the plants I really admired was a tall fig tree with dark leaves, which was so old that it no longer grew figs each year. It had the remains of long-dead vines wrapped around its trunk. I have never been able to get any fruit or other edible plant parts from the conservatory, but I wanted to include it in this post anyway, because the conservatory was such an important place to me. There are some pots of lavender along the side of where the sanctuary cafe in the lawns used to be. They're still there! That reminds me...grow lots of lavender! Bees love lavender!
I'm pretty sure I've covered most of the major edible plants in Lincoln. Of course, there are one-off edible plants everywhere in Lincoln, such as a rosemary plant growing next to a lamp post close by to my house. It's also extremely likely that I've missed a lot of great places out, knowing what my memory is like. Well, I hope you enjoyed reading this post and I hope it wasn't too long for you! Thank you for reading :)
