The large swarm of insects buzzing in and out of the roof of her rural New Jersey home had Tama Matsuoka Wong concerned. Her 93-year-old father liked to sit outside in his wheelchair—were these dangerous hornets, yellowjackets, or wasps?
No, a friend told her, after watching the insects fly. Just honeybees.
Ms. Wong called in bee wranglers experienced in removing hives from people’s homes. They carefully dismantled the relevant section of the roof to reveal a 4-foot expanse of honeycomb. The bees were rehomed at a nearby farm, and Ms. Wong found herself the happy possessor of a large section of wild honeycomb.
“Turns out, it’s particularly valued by honey gourmets for fermenting. It has a much deeper, more interesting flavor than the filtered commercial product you get in stores,” Ms. Wong said of the serendipitous result of an event most modern Americans would simply consider a problem.
Reframing Your Perspective
It all depends on how you frame your worldview and what you do as a result. The beehive episode perfectly illustrates a lifestyle philosophy that Ms. Wong, an expert forager and popularizer of wild foods, sets forth in her new book, “Into the Weeds: How to Garden Like a Forager.”Ms. Wong’s approach is simple: Treat the natural landscape that surrounds us with respect and understanding, and that will help both people and nature. In fact, that philosophy can be applied to your own property with many unexpected benefits.
“Bottom line, I think people will be happier if they learn to work with nature, rather than conquer it,” she explained. “I see lots of people living in $10 million mansions with yards brutally manicured once a week by crews that leave behind a flat, dead landscape.”
Ms. Wong applies this perspective to her 28-acre property and the surrounding undeveloped lands where she forages.
To most people, most wild plants are just weeds—wild and potentially wicked pests. To Ms. Wong, the plants she nurtures, protects, and uses in the woods and fields of rural New Jersey constitute nature’s garden—wild and wonderful.
Consider, for instance, two of her favorites, nettle and knotweed.
The former is famed for the stinging hairs found on its leaves and stems. It was also a legendary pioneer and Native American food; its ebullient early spring growth makes it one of the first vitamin-rich foods available in the Northern Hemisphere.
Today, most Americans who recognize it at all avoid it scrupulously so as not to get “stung” by the irritating nettle hairs. But nettle soup, nettle ravioli, nettle pesto—these spring delights now appear on the menus of Manhattan Migchelin-star restaurants, and Ms. Wong’s new book provides full instructions for finding, picking, and using nettles.
Knotweed is a now-notorious introduction from Asia that appears on almost every U.S. list of noxious invasive plants; it’s extremely difficult to remove. But in Asia, its young shoots are considered a delicious potherb. Rather than fight it, Ms. Wong maintains a small patch in her “garden”—a once-manicured, now laissez-faire section of her property.
“Knotweed tastes a bit like rhubarb,” she said. “Throw it in a tart with Himalayan blackberries and, presto, dessert!” That recipe isn’t in her book, but she does include one for making knotweed pickles, the juice from which can later be used to make knotweed soda, a refreshing summer picnic drink similar to lemonade.
Although invasive species officials might be aghast to hear of deliberate coexistence with knotweed, Ms. Wong takes a step back to broader, long-term human history when almost everything that surrounded us provided important material. Not long ago, after all, humankind was a hunter-gatherer species whose members lived by their own lights, rather than Cargill and Procter and Gamble. Thus, “Into the Weeds” provides information on how to construct wattle fencing; collect wild seeds; lightly “manage” a meadow; make smudges and fire starters; concoct tinctures, shrubs, jams, and more.
The book also includes information on how to recognize and avoid the very few plants that are actually dangerous, such as hemlock and poison ivy. But this section of the book is small—just three pages—an accurate reflection of the reality in nature.
Much of Ms. Wong’s gather-and-use activity reflects her childhood, when growing up on a different rural New Jersey property, her mother often went outdoors to procure something edible or medicinal. Though such a lifestyle may seem tedious to modern Americans, Ms. Wong argues that it’s actually quite convenient.
“If I need to fix something for my dad to eat, I might cook up a quick congee and dash outside to pick something in the yard to flavor it,” she said. “What could be more convenient than that?”
Our perspective shapes our understanding of the world. Consider the famous New Jersey wildlands called the Pine Barrens—which aren’t remotely barren.
“Wild cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries—you can even pick pine cones and use them to flavor drinks, like spruce tips,” Ms. Wong said. “The ‘barrens’ are just a sandy, specialized ecosystem from which the first domesticated blueberries were derived.”
Returning to Our Roots
Ms. Wong departed rural New Jersey as an adult and spent decades as a corporate attorney in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, and New York. But the lure of the countryside called her back to rural New Jersey, and her profession is now forager and foraging popularizer.Although the vast majority—80 percent—of America’s 335 million residents live within urban areas, she believes the lure of a more natural lifestyle remains strong among many.
“I have an apprentice who spent nine years as a tech worker. ‘Almost a decade at a computer screen, help!’ he tells me. A lot of young people these days know what they’re missing. A lot of people in the city actually want to be out of the city,” Ms. Wong said.
“All this that I do and teach is nothing new in human life. We got separated from it somehow,” she said.
“Like what happened with the beehive in my roof, I just hope we can become more open to the natural world around us and what it can provide.”
As she writes in “Into the Weeds”:
“The human footprint now dominates the earth ... We search farther for the paradise of the wild. But the wild is here: nature is in our own backyards, in our vacant lots, in our office parks.
“Those weedy plants are right here, tapping us on the shoulder, poking at our ankles, waiting for us to find them, to know them.”
