THE blackberry season of my childhood was a glorious opportunity for day-long adventures, roaming the countryside and scouring the hedgerows to gather quantities of plump, fat, juicy fruit, coming home late with scratched hands and arms.

It was a point of honour to bring home a good lot – as I’m sure many readers can remember. We ate blackberries with breakfast cereal, with apples in crumble and my mum even made them into jam from time to time. Now that wasn’t so very long ago (honest) but blackberrying isn’t quite the yearly event it used to be, and I am always gobsmacked to see this ubiquitous fruit being sold in plastic punnets in the supermarket.

I’ve made sloe gin too and eaten wild garlic leaves, sweet chestnuts and hazelnuts – but I would like to be far more knowledgeable about the edibles growing in the countryside. I realise there are many plants, fruits, fungi and even seaweeds I could eat if I were better informed.

You can find a range of foraging books in the shops these days, and one that caught my eye is Emma Gunn’s Never Mind the Burdocks: A Year in Foraging in the British Isles. It’s divided into four seasonal volumes and has a foreword by that fascinating Bruce Parry chap, presenter of the BBC series Tribe. He writes, “It strikes me that the growing desire to gather wild food is perhaps a timely return to a huge portion of our human journey.” I like that idea.

The book has an appealing notebook style, visually rich, and each book offers a day-by-day guide to identifying the hopefully delicious edibles you can find in what passes for the wild in the UK -woods, fields, hedgerows and seashores. It can also be used as a daily introduction to new plants and flavours, and features historical, educational and anecdotal facts on every page, delivered in Gunn’s characteristic playful tone. Her latest volume, Autumn, spans September to November, and features fruit, nuts and berries, as well as a special fungi-identification chapter.

While not strictly a book for vegans (who wouldn’t eat the fish or shellfish), there is plenty here for vegans, or anyone interested in wild food, to learn and enjoy.

Parry describes foraging as ‘a remembering of sorts, and a way of reconnecting to the subtleties of the landscape.’ For thousands of years our ability to gather food from the land was a vital part of life. I’d like to regain some of those lost skills.