Traffic from Highways 24 and 13 in Oakland roars as we walk under the shade of oaks and redwoods. To our left is a stand of fluffy emerald wild fennel, which 29-year-old tea-maker and edible wild plant educator Cindy Li kneels down to pick, smell, taste, then collect, placing a sprig of the herb into crinkled paper bags that formerly held pastries.
Li has been picking fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) since she could walk alongside her mother, who would later fold the licorice herb in with pork into homemade dumplings. Fennel began its invasion in California over a century ago, with deep taproots that survive disturbed soils and a generous seed bank birds love. Its dense stands have become so pervasive, the herb is now naturalized in North America.
Li and I share similar backgrounds: the daughters of Chinese immigrant mothers who raised their children in Los Angeles County. But it’s clear she knows quite a bit more than I do about plants. As a child, she studied leaf shapes and patterns in the garden cultivated by her mother, who grew and foraged for nearly all of their produce and carried around little bags on hikes with Li to collect greens for that night’s meal. “I don’t think I learned the word foraging for a long time,” says Li. “It was just my mom and I would go on walks or we’d go hiking.”
For the past few years, Li has led what she calls forays, during which she teaches edible plant identification at green spaces in the East Bay and San Francisco. Harvesting is illegal in most public spaces, and she makes it clear the foray is not a harvest. Instead she focuses on wild herbs—those that are abundant and often invasive. She also runs an edible plant Instagram account, with over 20,000 followers, where she reminds people to follow local rules.
I can see why her classes and videos are popular—between bursts of laughter and easy smiles, Li teaches with an infectious enthusiasm grounded in a mindfulness of her surrounding environment. If the plant is a native, like miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), Li plucks what she needs from the top of the plant, encouraging its growth. If it’s nonnative, like fennel or wild garlic, she’ll uproot it from the base.
And as I follow her gaze, study her techniques, and find familiar smells and tastes, I begin to recognize edible plants everywhere. If plants had leafy hands, they would belong to California mugwort (Artemisia douglasiana), minty and a touch tart, which Li likes to steep in hot water for relaxation. Wild three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum) grows rampant, with pungent, tangy stems—good for a stir-fry, bad for native plants—but otherwise appearing harmless, adorned with delicate white flowers. Just bloomed are the citrusy cousins—pale-pink sorrels (Oxalis incarnata) and yellow Bermuda buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae)—easy to spot, pleasantly sour to chew on in small amounts, and also nonnative. It appears that the most flavorful flowers also have the most territorial tendencies.
Plants are often deemed “inedible” in American foraging books due to Western conventions of flavor, says Li. So edible plant education is mostly centered around certain plants. “I feel like one thing that I was really missing from my group forays that I’ve gone on with other teachers or leaders was that all of them were white,” she adds. “There was no discussion and no context set about the history of foraging on this land.”
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Li tells me the story of rooreh, the Chochenyo word for miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), each bowl-shaped leaf adorned with a tiny white flower in the center. It tastes mildly sweet, and mostly watery, like spinach. During the Gold Rush, scurvy-ridden miners “observed the native people eating the plant, and they started eating it too,” says Li. “It has a lot of vitamin C and vitamin A, so it cured them of the scurvy problem.”
As we walk along the road, rooreh springs from the sidewalk cracks, just a few feet from cars whizzing by. While one might think the sidewalk un-forageable, a UC Berkeley study in 2019 showed that leafy greens like chickweed, mallow, and sour grass, growing through the asphalt and along roadsides in over 30 locations in Oakland, Richmond, and Emeryville, were safe to eat and sometimes more nutritious than domesticated leafy greens, after rinsing.
“You don’t have to go somewhere really far away,” says Li, “to see interesting plants.”
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Where to forage legally
Foraging is illegal at many Bay Area parks and preserves—check the rules before you go. Here are three North Bay spots that allow some gathering:
- Point Reyes National Seashore: 2 quarts a day of some berries and apples; 3 pounds of mushrooms a day. No foraging for sale.
- Salt Point State Park: 2 pounds a day per person. Organized groups larger than 10 people require a permit. No foraging for sale.
- Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Mendocino County: 1 gallon of mushrooms a month. Some commercial foraging allowed.
