The First Signs of Spring

There's a moment, usually in late February, when something shifts. The hedgerows still look bare, the ground is cold, and most people haven't registered that anything has changed. But if you know what to look for, you start to notice things. A shimmer of green along the base of a damp wall. A rosette of leaves you didn't see there last week. The land waking up before most people have noticed it's been asleep.

This is one of my favourite times to be out. Not because there's masses to find — there isn't, not yet — but because everything that is there feels significant. And what's there, if you know where to look, is genuinely delicious.

Hawthorn: bread and cheese from the hedge

The hawthorn is usually first. Not the blossom — that's a May thing — but the young leaf buds, which open into small, vivid green leaves with a flavour that surprises people every time. Sweet, faintly nutty, with a gentle freshness. Country people called them bread and cheese for centuries, which tells you something about how long this has been going on. There's no recipe required. They're good in a salad, good in a sandwich, good eaten straight from the hedge. The main thing is to get them young, before they toughen up.

Wood sorrel: sharp and citrusy

Wood sorrel tends to favour damp, shaded spots — old woodland floors, mossy banks, the kind of place where light comes through in shafts. The heart-shaped leaves are easy to recognise once you've seen them, and the flavour is sharply lemony — a clean citrus hit that wakes up whatever you put it with. It's too delicate to cook. Use it fresh: scattered over soup, stirred into a dressing, laid over smoked fish. It's one of those plants that makes a dish look and taste like someone actually thought about it.

Nettles: better than spinach, and free

Nettles will get their own post — they've earned it — but in early spring, before they get tall and coarse, the young tops are something special. Pick just the first couple of inches of growth, use gloves, blanch for a minute to kill the sting, and what you're left with is dense, iron-green, earthy and completely their own thing. More flavour than spinach, more depth than kale. Use them in soup, in pasta, in a frittata. They cost nothing and they're everywhere. That combination never stops being satisfying.

How to look

If you're new to foraging, the most useful thing I can tell you isn't which plants to find — it's how to look for them.

Slow down, and get low. Most spring plants are small and close to the ground. Learn to look at edges: the margin where a field meets a hedge, the strip of scrubby ground along a path, the base of an old wall. That's where the interesting things happen. Plants are opportunists.

And go back to the same places. If you visit the same patch of woodland every few weeks through spring, you'll start to understand it — what grows where, what comes first, how the season unfolds in that particular spot. It becomes somewhere you know, not just somewhere you walk through.

One more thing: be honest with yourself about identification. If you're not certain what something is, don't eat it. Most of what you'll find in early spring is benign and straightforward, but building good habits from the start is worth it. A reliable field guide and a bit of patience will take you a long way.

What's coming

By April things pick up considerably. Wild garlic at its peak. Ground elder filling the shady corners. Hawthorn blossom just starting to show. The hedgerows and woodlands putting on the show they put on every year — quietly extraordinary, and almost entirely overlooked by most people walking past.

That's the thing about spring foraging. The rewards are there. You just have to be paying attention.