June is the best month to be out with a basket. The hedgerows are full, the days are long

In my opinion early June is the best month to be out with a basket. The hedgerows are full, the days are long, and the elderflower — that great signal that summer has properly arrived — is at its peak. It won't last long, so June rewards the forager who pays attention and doesn't wait around.

Here at Taste the Wild, we spend a lot of time in the Calder Valley and across Yorkshire at this time of year. Here's what we're finding right now, and what to do with it.

Elderflower

This is the one. If you only forage one thing in June, make it elderflower. Elder trees are everywhere — along hedgerows, at the edges of woodland, beside rivers and streams, in churchyards. Right now they're almost buried under their own flowers: big, flat, creamy-white clusters that fill the air with a musky, honey-sweet scent on warm mornings.

Pick the flower heads when the weather has been dry for a day or two — it's the pollen that carries most of the flavour, and rain washes it away. Take just a few heads from each tree, and leave plenty behind to develop into elderberries later in the year.

The most obvious thing to make is elderflower cordial — steep the flower heads in a hot sugar syrup with lemon zest for 24 to 48 hours, strain, and bottle. It's simple, it keeps for weeks in the fridge (up to a year if you add a little citric acid), and it tastes incomparably better than anything you can buy. The flowers also work beautifully in fritters, infused into cream or custard, or scattered over grilled fish straight off the fire.

One important note: elder has some lookalikes that you need to know about. Hemlock — which is seriously poisonous — also has white umbrella-shaped flowers. But hemlock grows from the ground rather than from woody branches, and its stems are often blotched with purple. It also smells unpleasant rather than sweet. Cow parsley is another ground-level lookalike. As long as you're picking from a genuinely woody-stemmed elder, you're on solid ground — but if you're new to this, go out with someone who can show you in person first.

Sweet Cicely

Sweet cicely is one of those plants that northern foragers treasure and southerners often haven't heard of. It's common in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and into Scotland — along roadsides, streamsides, and shady lane verges — but it gets rarer the further south you go. In the Calder Valley we find it reliably and it's one of our favourite June plants.

It's a tall, soft, feathery-leafed plant with white flowers that look a bit like cow parsley. The easiest way to identify it is to pick a leaf, crush it between your fingers, and smell it — the aniseed scent is immediately obvious and unlike anything else you'll find in a British hedgerow.

The flavour is sweet and gently anise-like, and one of its great kitchen virtues is that it reduces the sourness of fruit without adding sugar. Stew some rhubarb with a handful of sweet cicely leaves and you'll need noticeably less sugar than usual. The green, unripe seeds are also delicious eaten straight from the plant — intensely anise-flavoured, with a pleasant sweetness. It's one of those little discoveries that makes June walks genuinely exciting.

Common Mallow

From June onwards you'll start finding common mallow on roadsides, waste ground, and rough field edges across most of Britain. It's an easy one to learn — the flowers are hard to miss, with their five pink-purple petals streaked with darker veins.

The leaves and flowers are both edible. The leaves have a slightly sticky, mucilaginous quality when cooked, which means they'll thicken a soup or stew in a similar way to okra (mallow and okra are botanical relatives). Young leaves work well wilted into dishes or added fresh to salads. The flowers make a lovely garnish, and the small, round seed pods — traditionally called "cheeses" because of their shape — are pleasant to nibble raw, with a mild, grassy flavour.

It's not a plant that'll be the centrepiece of a meal, but it's a useful, versatile addition to the forager's June repertoire, and the flowers alone are worth knowing for the plate.

Yarrow

Yarrow is one of those plants that's everywhere once you start noticing it — in meadows, on grassy verges, at the edges of paths, even in lawns. The leaves are very finely divided, almost feathery, and intensely aromatic when you rub them. The flowers are flat-topped clusters of small white or pale pink blooms, and the whole plant smells herbal and slightly medicinal.

The leaves are the useful part for cooking. They're bitter and complex, so you use them sparingly — as a seasoning rather than a vegetable. A few leaves added to a salad or an infused vinegar bring an interesting depth that's hard to pin down but definitely there. Yarrow has been used in ale-making for centuries before hops became the standard bittering agent, which gives you a sense of its character.

Wood Sorrel

If you spend any time in damp, shaded woodland in June, you'll almost certainly walk past wood sorrel — small clumps of three heart-shaped leaves on slender stems, looking very much like clover, often with delicate white flowers veined with pale lilac. The leaves fold shut at night and in bright sunlight.

Taste one. The flavour is sharp, clean, and intensely lemony — a good handful in a green salad transforms it. It's one of those wild plants where the flavour is so immediate and so good that it tends to convert even hesitant foragers on the spot. Use it as you'd use a squeeze of lemon, because that's essentially what it does to a dish.

A Word on Foraging Responsibly

June is a busy time in the countryside, and it's worth keeping a few basics in mind. For personal use, picking flowers, fruit, foliage, and fungi on land where you're lawfully present is legal under the Theft Act 1968 — but uprooting any plant is not permitted without the landowner's consent, under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Commercial foraging anywhere in the UK requires landowner permission.

Beyond the law, the obvious things apply: take only what you'll actually use, leave plenty behind for wildlife and other foragers, and don't strip a stand bare. The land gives back when it's treated well.

Always carry a good field guide and positively identify everything before you eat it. If you're new to foraging and want to learn properly, the single best thing you can do is get out with someone who already knows what they're doing. We run foraging workshops in the Calder Valley and across West Yorkshire — details on our website.

Taste the Wild is a wild food consultancy based in the Calder Valley. We run foraging workshops, land surveys, and work with estates and hospitality businesses to put wild food at the heart of what they do. Get in touch to find out more.