Foraging for wild garlic: how, when and what to be careful for

A FEW weeks in the past, simply outdoors London, I discovered a foodie jackpot: a patch of forest carpeted with wild garlic. The white flowers hadn’t but emerged from their buds, so I won’t have observed the patch if I hadn’t been searching for it. Once I final picked wild garlic in Cornwall a number of years in the past, the heady aroma from its blooms was so robust you might hardly miss it.

The plant often referred to as wild garlic within the UK, Allium ursinum (pictured above), will be discovered throughout Europe and Asia in damp and shady woodland. It begins to …