This park is one of the best places for mid-spring foraging. It boasts a large, mature, secondary growth forest, trail edges, thickets, and cultivated areas--all overflowing with wild plants, and Violet Brill will teach you how to identify, harvest ecologically, and use dozens of them. Sweet cicely, root vegetable, taste like black licorice, outstanding in desserts, or in grain or bean dishes. Sassafras tastes like root beer, which you make from the taproots. You can also use it for brewing a delicious, detoxifying tea, and as a cinnamon-like seasoning. The black birch tree, of birch beer fame, is a common forest tree that tastes like wintergreen. Everyone will also find plenty of leafy green vegetables, such as chickweed, which tastes like corn, Asiatic dayflower, which tastes like string beans, pungent garlic mustard roots with their garlicky leaves, spicy poor man's pepper, mild-flavored violets, piquant greenbrier leaves and shoots, plus spicy field garlic and hedge mustard. You'll look for asparagus-flavored Devil's walking stick shoots, plus Japanese knotweed, with a sour flavor akin to its relative, rhubarb. It's loaded with vitamin C, as well as resveratrol, which reduces the risk of heart disease. The tour will last for about 4 hours. Please wear a mask and observe social distancing.
New York City, NY; NYC