What is Wild: Wild is Cultivated

In the spring I held back some of the tender red-streaked bulbs of ramps with their flopping shining leaves and planted them in my backyard in the shade of the mammoth oak and maple and tulip trees likely a hundred years old by now. In the fall I returned to the secret spot I pilgrim to each spring and collected the ridged matte-black seeds from their papery covers, crushed one and breathed in the pungent oniony aroma to make sure, then went back home and seeded a small area underneath the watchful oak.


In one valley a village prides itself on its special preparation of pickles using some of the herbs of its woods for seasoning. Over the ridge whose road is impassable in the dead of winter, another village makes a bread whose unique flavor is said to come from the air, that is the yeast floating in the air, of just that valley. Festivals are held: young ones learn by the side of elders; travelers come to appreciate what can only be had right here; stories are told that embed practicalities within the fantastic, kneading knowledge and myth together.

All through the Appalachians ramps have been collected, a welcome herald of spring and a tonic, by the small communities living on the precipice of impossibility in hollows and glades along the folding laps of these ancient grandmotherly mountains. What has changed in the past few years is precisely that someone like myself, a horticulturist and ex-New Yorker moved to the country with an appreciation for the concept of local foods, discovered ramps too. Globalism has not only connected Kansas to Bangalore but New York City to the Catskills, Washington, DC to the hollows of West Virginia, and Cleveland to the woods a half-hour from my house in Oberlin. What once was a special spring treat among isolated communities has become a favorite of upscale chefs in the urban hubs of the east. Consequently, alarms have been sounding that ramps may become scarcer and scarcer as demand rises.

One can enter the woods like a thief: scour the vaults and only see money in those shining green leaves. But then there are no woods, only a transitive space, a means to an end. When the woods enter the forager, she becomes the highest expression of the woods and plants them with each footstep.

When I happen upon a ramp clump, I only ever thin the clump, making space for more plants to grow. And now I also plant a few and collect and scatter seeds and cultivate them, in the woods and in my yard -- which is also the woods.

What is wild here was also once cultivated. Bitter dandelion, fat cheerful scalloped leaves of Creeping Charlie zippering along through my vegetable beds, thick plantain leaves once called “white man’s footprint” for their habit of hitching rides in Puritan pockets and black pantaloons, brash all-too-common orange daylilies sprouting out of every crack: all these arrived here carried with intention, feeding the stomach or nursing the body.

From every direction, here emerges. Even before Europeans arrived, maize traveled and arrived here. Paw paw trees were set out in orchards through the great eastern woods all the way to Lake Eerie.

Thus, our weeds were our great-great-grandmothers’ comfort and herbarium. What does it say of us that, because they did so well without need of our tending, they devolved in our minds into nuisances and pests, baubles and background?

If on the one hand ramps’ scarcity calls for cultivation, then weeds’ ubiquity calls for their usage: dandelion leaves and roots for tonic and tea; creeping Charlie for colds; plantain to thicken the blood of a wound; daylilies for shoots, flowers, and roots.