Wild Food: A Complete Guide for Foragers

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Phillips has been a natural nonconformist. Three months into his national service in the RAF in Canada, he says, he somehow persuaded an air vice marshal to let him go home on the basis that he didn’t want to be trained to kill people. He later gave up work as an art director at the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, to become a freelance photographer, concentrating on plants. His guiding philosophy has always been: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it.” That spirit has taken him all over the world – adventures in wild food that are celebrated in his latest book, The Worldwide Forager. The first time I made nettle soup, it was edible, but underwhelming, leading me to the conclusion that, though I was glad one could eat one of the few edible wild foods in abundance locally, I wouldn’t be rushing to repeat the experience while I could still afford to buy greens. Yet the enthusiasm of others for this stinging weed unsettled me: could it be that I, rather than the poor old nettle, was at fault? He wrote and presented two six-part TV series on gardening (BBC & Channel 4). Famed for his ebullient personality and garish red glasses, he has become a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening.

He is best known as an expert on mushrooms and roses who wrote more than forty books on gardening and wild plants and fungi; many with Martyn Rix. [3] [5] He was also an Honorary Garden Manager at Eccleston Square in London, where he lived, [3] [6] and served as chair of the Society for the Protection of London Squares. [2]This is not intended to be a full statement of all your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations. Full details of your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations are available in the UK from your local Citizens' Advice Bureau or your Local Authority's Trading Standards Office. He did his national service with the RAF in Canada but resigned his commission on pacifist principles and returned to London, where he worked in a hospital and took a course at the Chelsea School of Art. “Roger was lively and gregarious,” remembers his contemporary Alan Gilchrist, “contributing regularly to theatrical events, and was the art editor of the school’s magazine Concetto.” A friend and fellow conspirator in cultural interventions was Brian Innes, whose band Roger booked for a school ball even before they became the Temperance Seven. Roger was a natural to present TV programmes about nature, and showed how to slow-cook a ham in compost Roger was an ad man before turning to photography, having worked as Creative Director at Ogilvy and Mather. According to Horticulture Week magazine, he deliberately set out to create a collection of books on plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book Wild Flowers of Britain was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year.

You need a sugar for the yeast to ferment. Begin with a specific gravity of 1.095 to finish at 0.995. Phillips, Roger, Derek Reid, Ronald Rayner, and Lyndsay Shearer. 1981. Mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe. London: Pan Books. Meanwhile, years of voluntary work in the communal garden in Eccleston Square, Pimlico, where he lived, led in 1980 to Phillips being asked to take on its management. Under his stewardship the garden, now part of the National Gardens Scheme, was transformed into a plantsman’s paradise, containing the National Collection of Ceanothus, in addition to some 200 different climbing roses and 120 different Camellias.

Leaves only: legendary forager Roger Phillips’ nettle soup. All thumbnail images by Felicity Cloake. Phillips trained at Chelsea School of Art from where he entered a career in advertising culminating in the position of art director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. He left O&M to start a career as a freelance photographer, winning many awards before turning his photographic talents to the world of natural history. Phillips published books about trees and ferns and wild flowers before he got to mushrooms. He didn’t think the publisher at Pan would go for it. The British, he suggests, had always been funny about fungi. While across Europe and beyond natives would be out in fields and forests as if on pilgrimage in mushroom season, in the UK there was no tradition. “We were famous for herbs from medieval times, of course,” says Phillips. “But those books tend to refer to mushrooms as ‘the spit of Jesus’ or ‘the fruit of the devil’. Because they grew up from nowhere overnight they were associated with witchcraft.” Phillips was best known as an expert on roses and fungi.He was Honorary Garden Manager at Ecclestone Square in London and in the 2010 New Year's Honours Listwas awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares.