Kinds of Honey

Trillium seems to me such a gently joyful flower. It was one of the first flowers I learned to identify as a child out wandering the acres of our farm in Minnesota. There we had a happy mix of woodland, field, and pasture, just as we do here at Hungry Turtle, where we are working carefully towards resilient health and better farm-habitat integration on this somewhat well-worn landscape.

Fortunately, the woods bordering the pasture nearest the learning center (where I live and work) seem to be fairly well left alone, since bloodroot and ramps and strawberries and raspberries and trillium are wild and abundant here. I feel as if I’ve stumbled into a trove of nature’s offerings, which she has quite finely brought about herself, thank you very much, and which are not necessarily meant for me.

I will likely harvest some berries, a handful of ramps, and a good helping of stinging nettles (they are invasively everywhere). The bloodroot and trillium can stay and bloom and I will scarcely touch them. The creeping charlie at the edge of the wood tempts me to try to make it into tea, and I think I will.

But I want to barely make a dent. These woods are just a little of what remains seemingly wild in this world, and if I can forage here it will – it must – be gently, in a way that allows them to remain so.