Lund, Sweden: winter in the botanical garden

Winter may not seem like the best time to visit a botanical garden. It’s cold, the trees look stark and leafless, and the smaller plants look, well, pathetic. But as I recently saw in Lund, Sweden, a garden in winter holds other other surprises…

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Berlin: Edible plant walk

In a city with many wild-growing plants, you begin to wonder if some might be useful. When I weed my 10 square meters at the community garden, carting piles of unknown plants to the compost heap and leaving just a few lonely vegetables amidst bare dirt, it seems ridiculous to dismiss so many robust green plants just because they are weeds, i.e. just because I didn’t plant them. But beyond young dandelions, which I’ve started taking home and sautéeing, what other wild plants are good to eat?

Thanks to a tip from Berlin Reified, I got the chance to find out more. I signed up for a Kräuterwanderung (herb walk) led by the very knowleadgeable and enthusiastic Elizabeth Westphal of the Berlin Grüne Liga, an environmental non-profit. Last Friday, she led about thirty urban plant enthusiasts through the beds, fields and woods of the botanical park in Berlin-Blankenfelde. Here are some of the plants we tasted.

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