Break out your chaps and leather jacket! Catbriar season is on on the east coast, and the more you can protect yourself the more of those crisp delicious tendrils and shoots you can harvest. This plant also goes by the name of greenbriar, and a few other nice and not-so-nice names. I believe the one in the photograph below is Smilax rotundifolia. Bend the end of the vine where still flexible and it will easily snap off (thorns on the flexible shoots are soft and flexible as well).

I spent a few days in Maryland, just south of Washington DC, with family. How patient they are with my wild food experiments. We ate the dish described in the recipe below for nearly every meal. The wild garlic and bamboo shoots are widely available right now as well, and along with the smilax can also be eaten raw. Snap off young bamboo shoots (photograph below), peel off outside skin until you reach tender inner core, and slice. Continue slicing and removing tough outer skin as you move up the shoot.

Smilax Bamboo Stirfry

4 c smilax, cut in 4 inch segments
1 c bamboo shoots, sliced
1/8 c oil
1/2 c wild garlic bulbs and tops, chopped
1/2 t wild ginger powder
1/8 c soy sauce

Put oil into pan over medium-high heat. Once oil is heated add sliced bamboo shoots. After about 1 minute add wild ginger powder. After one more minute add wild garlic and smilax. Stir thoroughly, turn heat to high and add soy sauce. Let cook for one minute and serve immediately.

Ila Hatter, a direct descendent of Pocahontas, is an amazing mountain woman. She integrates the wild plants into her daily life and is a powerful educator in their favor. After delving into my family history, and getting a good deal on a rental car, I was set to get in a visit to meet Ila near the Cherokee Reservation and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Our relatives (Pocahontas and Thomas Savage) grew up as brother and sister, with Pocahontas naming her son Thomas. It is said the two shared a close relationship….Ila and myself certainly share a love of the plants!

Wildcrafting.com is Ila’s official website. She and her husband Jerry have produced some beautiful educational media on wild foods. Ila has a great gift of including much of the folklore about the plants she highlights. Her video’s Wild Edibles & Medicinals of Southern Appalachia and Mountain Kitchen, as well as her cookbook Roadside Rambles: A Collection of Wild Food Recipes are available for purchase through her website. I love her motto: The Woods and Fields are a Table Always Spread!

Ila published a recent article in The Tennessee Conservationist about Wildflower Lore. Here’s an excerpt from Ila’s article, “The white Trillium grandiflorum was thought (by the Cherokee) to be an effective love potion. A maiden mixed it into the bowl of stew she was taking to the chief’s son she fancied. But on the way to his lodge she tripped and the mixture fell into the bowl of an ugly old man who followed her for weeks begging her to marry him. So if there is a moral, it’s to watch your step when resorting to love potions to attract a lover. Mountain superstition says if a woman picks a white trillium, it will rain. It certainly did on that Indian maiden’s expectations!”

My Mom says that the trilliums were blooming when I was born. I was lucky to find these trilliums (photograph above) on the Cherokee Reservation. Although trillium’s are sometimes noted as having edible spring greens, please do not do so unless in a survival situation. Some species have been placed on the endangered species list, many have been hit extrememly hard by our overabundance of browsing deer, and it is said they take nearly 20 years to flower.

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The final sunset from the NC Wild Food Weekend. Dried out cattail stalks frame the bottom of the photo. Vickie Shufer was Friday evening’s keynote speaker. She is a naturalist guide, publicist, and editor for the quarterly publication The Wild Foods Forum. You can visit Vickie’s website to see her upcoming events in the Virginia Beach, VA area by clicking here. Sam Thayer Price was Saturday evening’s keynote speaker. You can visit his Forager’s Harvest website by clicking here. Below are some fun pics from a few wild, uncultivated folks in attendance.

Mountain music.

Wildman Zeke

Garlic top ladies.