How to forage sustainably?

I established Herbarium Box to demonstrate what a small business pressing plants sustainably might look like. This post is aims to help everyone make sound ethical choices about how you run your small botanical business.

Is wild flower pressing for a small business sustainable?

“Growing native species in your garden or allotment is best practice. ”

I press cultivated native wild plant species supplied by specialist nurseries who propagate from their own stock, so do not collect plants from the wild. Emorsgate Seeds and Naturescape are two of the best known examples of specialist nurseries.

People are often surprised: Why buy and grow these plants when there are "freebies" in the countryside? My view is that foraging for a small business is only sustainable - by which I mean both legal and ethical - in limited circumstances and it simply feels better to cultivate as much as I can, not collect.

Legally

If you are collecting wild plants to sell in any form, the law in England and Wales is stricter than for a person merely foraging a small quantity for their own or their family's non-commercial use.

The law is set out in the key guidance for foragers, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland's Code of Conduct for collecting wild plant material. This is co-authored by Natural England so it is the definitive go-to guidance (from www.bsbi.org).

If you are selling wild plant material you always need landowner permission, including from 'public' sites as these are owned, usually by the local authority. It sounds surprising but even collecting blackberries or cow parsley from a roadside verge (owned by the local authority) to sell means you need a letter giving you permission from the council.

Commercial use includes selling the plant material in any form, so as jams, drinks, dyes, in floristry and wedding displays, or as pressed plants.

Legally there are also some fully protected species of wild plant that you must not pick, even with landowner consent.

However, foraging legally is only the first step. What about decisions about which species it is fine to forage and which species you should avoid picking because these are widespread but severely declining, or because other people also might be collecting from the same site so putting pressure on the population? These are ethical questions.

Ethically

I decided that for Herbarium Box, I will only collect from a single large site near my home under a legal licence. I can collect a limited amount of certain native species from this urban nature reserve, where many of the wild plants were introduced as plugs. I pay for this licence and I support the reserve's management by donating back. In this way, any impact of my collecting on the plants is also monitored over time.

And I use a lot of discretion and judgement at this site. I follow the BSBI code and only pick parts (never an entire plant) of very common species that are thriving in semi-natural habitats. For example, cow parsley, rosebay willowherb, meadow or creeping buttercup, daisies or bracken. This means I need to know for certain that I am not picking bulbous buttercup or Goldilocks, or example, which are quite common but threatened by habitat loss.

However, even with landowner consent, foraging some species, such as violets, cowslips, primroses, wood anemone or ragged robin is, I believe, unacceptable, as they have declined in many parts of Britain. Once familiar plants like wild pansy, many people are surprised to learn, are now officially on the Red List as near threatened due to habitat loss. Yet all of these species I've just mentioned are available grown from cultivated stock by nurseries, so there is no need for a plant presser to collect from wild populations.

Further, there are two ecological complications. Firstly, invertebrates rely on plants. For example, the endangered pearl-bordered fritillary butterfly depends on wild violets as its sole caterpillar food plant. Do we need to forage violets more than this threatened butterfly needs these flowers? Second, just because a plant species looks abundant on a site, or around where you live, doesn't mean that it is common in other parts of the country too. Here's a cautionary tale, from the March 2022 edition of the BSBI Scottish Newsletter:

A forager collected sea kale from a beach in Arran, Scotland; it turned out that he had taken every leaf from the *single* plant recorded for that island which had only been found by a botanist a few hours earlier! His mistake? Assuming that a plant species which is common near his home in Kent is also common everywhere else.

To sum up, 'sustainability' encompasses legal and ethical issues. So "only picking a bit on a public site", if that's the sole thing I am considering, is not sustainable. I need to collect legally, and for commercial business use, that means getting landowner consent. I also must think about the ethical perspective: can I really say I am doing no harm to a habitat and ecosystem by picking just a bit? I think it depends on what you are picking, where, when and how, how much, and what you are doing with the plant material.

But as I hope I've stressed, this blog outlines my own approach. What do you think?