Foragers encouraged to harvest wild foods and medicines sustainably around Vancouver

At John Hendry Park in Vancouver, Bryce Watts pointed out the abundance of wild foods and medicines that exist in the form of common shrubs, trees, and weeds.

The ethnobotanist told the Georgia Straight that pineapple weed is used to make a tea that promotes sleep and relaxation. Blackberry shoots may be peeled and eaten in the spring. Red elderberry is turned into a syrup for relief of cold and flu symptoms, and its flowers can be battered and fried to make a fritter.

Then there’s plantain, a ubiquitous ground-hugging plant with oval-shaped leaves that are used to make a poultice for insect bites.

“That’s a really good one,” Watts said. “You can put it in salads, put it in sandwiches, basically like a spinach or a lettuce.”

Watts is the 25-year-old president and cofounder of the Forager Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2013 that aims to promote traditional knowledge. According to him, foraging—gathering foods and medicines from wild plants and fungi—is growing in popularity.

“There’s the whole 100-mile diet that’s really popular, and going out for wild foods is a little extra layer added on top of that,” Watts said. “People are definitely getting a lot more interested in learning what’s out in the natural environment.”

This summer, the Forager Foundation is offering foraging tours lasting two or three hours in places such as Stanley Park in Vancouver, Pacific Spirit Regional Park in the University Endowment Lands, Sunnyside Acres Urban Forest in Surrey, Campbell Valley Regional Park in Langley, Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver, Alice Lake Provincial Park in Squamish, and Lost Lake Park in Whistler.

During these tours, Watts informs participants about the importance of foraging in an ethical manner that leaves food and shelter for animals and avoids environmental degradation. As a general rule, he noted, foragers harvest no more than 10 percent of a given resource in an area.

“That leaves a little bit if someone else is coming,” Watts said. “You don’t know who’s coming after you. So 10 percent leaves some for the plant to regenerate next year and for birds and animals to still be able to eat as well.”

Watts also tells tour participants that they aren’t allowed to harvest in parks. Indeed, foraging is a problem in some parks in the Vancouver area.

Gudrun Jensen, Metro Vancouver’s division manager of visitor and operations services for regional parks, told the Straight that, despite the fact foraging is prohibited, people do harvest berries, fiddleheads, moss, mushrooms, Oregon grape, salal, stinging nettle, and wood in Capilano River, Pacific Spirit, and other regional parks.

“Everybody loves to pick blackberries or thimbleberries as they’re walking along a trail,” Jensen said by phone from Burnaby. “We won’t be too hard on people, but we do try to explain that’s all food for the wildlife in the park and our main reason is to protect and conserve the ecosystem. All those foods, we don’t need them, but they need them. Regional parkland is finite, so there’s only so much to go around.”

Jensen asserted that it’s important to consider to cumulative effect of foraging in regional parks. Metro Vancouver park officers can issue fines ranging from $375 to $1,000 for damaging or removing park property and other offences.

“A whole lot of foragers can cause immense environmental damage,” Jensen said. “We get almost 11 million visitors a year to our regional parks, and you just imagine that onslaught of pressure onto those sensitive ecosystems. So we try to teach people. We do have a bylaw. We do give warnings. We do write tickets on occasion, if we need to escalate it.”

The City of Vancouver’s parks control bylaw stipulates: “No person shall cut, break, injure, remove or in any way destroy or damage any rock, soil, tree, shrub, plant, turf or flower”.

“We do have the ability to say, ‘No, you can’t do it,’” Bill Harding, Vancouver’s director of parks, said of foraging. “But as long as it’s small, we don’t really enforce it, because we see the benefits of it for people. We don’t mind it as long as it’s done in an appropriate fashion.”

Indeed, Harding told the Straight that the city “doesn’t have a problem” with people picking apples, berries, mushrooms, and other foods growing wild in parks.

“Obviously, we have a problem with people taking annuals out of our beds and things like that—things that are definitely planted for a reason,” Harding said. “And that has happened in the past.”

According to the B.C. Ministry of Environment, foraging for wild plants and fungi is illegal in provincial parks, though commercial mushroom harvesters disregard this from time to time. This prohibition doesn’t apply to First Nations people exercising their aboriginal and treaty rights. (The Lower Mainland lies in the traditional territories of multiple Coast Salish First Nations.)

Watts said the Forager Foundation holds its tours in parks because they’re an “easy place to meet”. But he asserted that the appropriate place for foraging is Crown land outside of parks, such as on the North Shore and in the Fraser Valley.

According to Watts, foragers should be mindful of their environmental impact.

“It’s always important to be sustainable when you’re doing anything, and it’s the same with wild foraging,” Watts said. “It’s really easy to, if you’re not paying attention, pick everything in the area and wipe that plant out.”