#96: Illicit Foraging
Hunting forbidden wild garlic in Brussels
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Continuing this month’s (loose) food theme, we go allium picking - or not - in the woods of Brussels!
Yesterday, somewhat unusually, I found myself in two different woods on the same day. In the morning I was in the Laarbeekbos, dropping N and Z off to their Easter Week holiday camp at the local pedagogical farm, where the neighbourhood city kids can LARP to their heart’s delight among the goats and dray horses and pigs.
The Laarbeek woods are a little ragged, with rotting wooden picket fences and collapsed cement walls lining either side of the gravelly footpaths that curl up the hill. But they’re alive, not just with cocorico of roosters and the bleats of the goats and sheep from the farm, but with rabbits galumphing through the bumpy meadows and the occasional fox slinking around on the farm’s edge. Walking up the path from our tram stop to the farm, there was a smell coming from the bushes either side of me that I couldn’t quite place, just the faintest tang. I’d read previously that several of the woods around Brussels were great places to find wild garlic - daslook in Dutch, which i like to think is because the leaves look like a cravat (it’s actually because there’s some association with the badger, or das). I had never seen wild garlic before, at least not in real life, and so wasn’t exactly sure what to be on the lookout for, but the sweet, slightly sticky, hot smell coming from the bushes in the woods prompted me to get out my phone and google “how to identify wild garlic”.
And sure enough, the waxy green shrubs with the sparkling white flowers on the videos that came up matched the waxy green tufts that carpeted the banks on either side of the footpath we were on. I ben down and stripped half a leaf from its stem, and the smell that came from it – somewhere between an unripe garlic clove and a fresh scallion – confirmed my suspicions.
Another article came up on my search too, though, one from Brussels’ environmental protection agency warning that any foraging of wild plants in the city’s protected woodlands – of which the Laarbeekbos is one – was strictly forbidden. I am a law-abiding citizen (read: coward), so I left it at that one, torn leaf and made my way further through the woods. It is an old forest, but not as old as they seem, having only been planted sometime after the 1600s to provide hunting grounds for he local nobility.
Stand at the highest point on the hill on which they were set now and all you’ll see is the top of a lush canopy of beech trees. But had you stood by the walls of the ancient Roman villa, of which now only the outline remains, when it was first built 2,000 years ago you might have been able to look across the Zenne river basin as far as the primordial Forêt de Soignes on the very far side of Brussels. It’s not a corner of the city I go to very often, for reasons which I was reminded of later the same day as my number 25 tram took a faintly ridiculous hour to stumble from Rogier to the edge of the woods in Uccle. I had forced myself on that calvary for a particular, and ultimately unsuccessful, reason – more of which in a future entry.
I didn’t penetrate the woods very deeply, skirting around its edges because that’s where the points of interest were that brough me all that way. Walking on the wide paths near the old racetrack, I couldn’t help but remark on how dead the place seemed in comparison with the woods I’d been in that morning. The verges next to the footpaths weren’t bursting with vivid green nor giving off any kind of allium perfume; they were crowded with angry nettles and sticky cleavers. I could hear the chirping of invisible birds high up in the trees above me, but the place did not make me feel restful in the same way as the Laarbeekbos; quite the opposite, it felt overly manicured, oppressively bucolic.
In the afternoon I returned to the Laarbeekbos to collect the children, and on the way down the hill from the farm, in between their detailed debrief of the day’s events, I told them about the wild garlic that was growing beside the footpath. As I had done before, I tore off the tip of a nearby leaf to let them smell what I’d smelled, suggesting we could take a bushel home with us. N exclaimed with surprise and delight how garlicky it smelled. Z, on the other hand, was appalled. Not just as my casual defiling of this plant, but at my suggestion we could take some with us as a surprise for their mother. Utterly out of the question; didn’t I know you weren’t allowed to take plants from the woods, no matter their smell or their taste. It wasn’t allowed, and therefore we wouldn’t be doing it. What could I do? Of course not, I said, when she asked me if I was really going to take some. Of course, I wouldn’t.