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It took over five years for Nathaniel Rich to finish his first novel — maybe because he was writing The Mayor's Tongue secretly, first as a college student, and then while writing film criticism during the day.

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Author: apartmentfinder29
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Added: September 3, 2010

Author: ApartmentFinder14
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Added: September 3, 2010

Author: ApartmentFinder14
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Added: September 3, 2010

Photography adds another dimension to wild food foraging – not just for identification purposes but as an art form

• Send your photos of nature's harvest to our Green shoots Flickr group

There are as many reason for the current resurgent rise in enthusiasm for all things wild food and foraging-related as there are wild foods themselves – from belt tightening austerity measures, to a desire to source local, sustainable food without the organic price tag and creativity in the kitchen. Some people choose to forage rather than shop in order to connect with seasonal rhythms instead of the discordant economic and clock-watching dictates of a mundane working week.

As a full-time forager – someone with an all-encompassing hobby that I sometimes try to pass off as work – all of the above, as well as deep-seated philosophical, psychological and spiritual reasons, have led me to an all-embracing commitment to wild food. It is a commitment that seeks to engage with – indeed even capture in some small way – the verdant, fleeting and ephemeral delights that nature exhibits.

As a child, the first books I encountered that seemed to capture in small part the magnificence of nature were Edith Holden's delightful 1906 The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and Rev William Keeble Martin's exquisitely illustrated The Concise British Flora in Colour. Later, as a teenager, I came upon the book Wild Food by the now grand master of photographic guides, Roger Phillips. His superb photography seemed to truly capture the mysterious elements that made foraging for wild food so appealing - delightfully arranged rustic compositions showed tarte aux myrtilles on the banks of a woodland stream; blackberry pies, tarts and jams against a backdrop of stubble-burning field, and Carragheen soup precariously balanced on craggy waveswept rocks. These pictures were alive with the raw beauty, hinted dangers and creative promise of wild food.

Being neither well-suited to poetry nor painting, photography allowed me to add an engaging and enjoyable dimension to my wild food pursuits. The photographic dimension to foraging is wonderfully varied: plant portraits for identification; final dish shots; underwater photography of seaweeds resplendent in their natural element, or arty photos just for the creative and celebratory joy of it all.

In the UK, the changing seasons and varied habitats of specific wild plant foods offer endless scope for exciting pictures: nuts, berries, leaves, roots and fungi, their fascinating colours naturally juxtaposed against storm-leaden skies, misty rivers, and sun-baked earth. Raw settings and macro lens offer up the unique perspective of the intimate and super close-up view, revealing hidden details and mysterious patterns in seed husks and fruit skins.

The following list of wild foods available in September is in no way exhaustive. Apart from Hottentot figs and bilberries, that don't grow here, and truffles that I've never been lucky enough to find, these are all the things I regularly forage down in Kent:

Fruit: Elderberry, Juke of Argyle's "Goji" tea plant berries, black nightshade berry (some caution advised), dog rose hip, mulberry, wild service tree and other sorbus spp berries, Japanese rose hip, hawthorn berry (haws), staghorn sumac berries, blackberries, dewberries, bilberries, sloes, sea buckthorn berries, apples, crab apples, rowan berries, pears, figs, Hottentot figs, Himalayan honeysuckle berries (some caution advised), Yew berries (lots of caution advised), cherry plums, greengages, Juniper berries, hops.

Leaves: Watercress, sea aster, seabeet, sea purslane, perennial wallrocket, fat hen, water mint and other mints, Canadian fleabane, sow thistle, wood sorrel, common sorrel, ox-eye daisy, sea plantain, marsh samphire (tips), bristly ox-tongue.

Flowers: Yarrow, heather, common mallow.

Roots/bulbs: Burdock root, horse radish root, dandelion root, ramsons/wild garlic bulbs (and roots).

Nuts/seeds: Walnuts (soft - for making pate), beech nuts (mast), Himalayan balsam seeds, hazelnuts, great plantain seeds, wild carrot seeds, fennel seeds, poppy seeds, cabbage family plant seeds, common hogweed seeds.

Fungi: Giant puffball, summer truffle, chanterelle, parasol, fairy ring, jelly ear, penny bun and other boletes, fly agaric (caution advised, toxins must be leached out first before consuming) summer truffles, cauliflower fungus, beefsteak fungus, field and horse mushroom and other agaricus species.

Seaweeds: Dulse, laver, Carragheen, grape pip weed, oyster thief,

Wracks: Bladder, toothed, horned, egg, spiral, channelled,

Kelps: Oarweed, furbellows, sugar kelp, thongweed, sea lettuce, gutweed and other ulva species, dabberlocks, japweed, pepper dulse.

For those new to wild foods, apart from attending wild food or plant/fungi identification courses, I'd recommend Roger Phillips's Wild Food, The Wild Flower Key by Francis Rose and Clare O'Reilly, the photographic edition of Richard Mabey's classic Food for Free, Miles Irving's The Forager Handbook and the excellent web-based resource and database, Plants For A Future.

• Fergus Drennan is a broadcaster and writer.

• Send your photos of nature's harvest to our Green shoots Flickr group

• Ethical and green living
• Food
• Plants
• Food & drink
• Photography

Da Vinci's study of two soldiers, at the Royal Academy this autumn, captures battlefield trauma as ferociously as Don McCullin

War is coming to London. A drawing that shows us the reality of battle reflected in an old warrior's eyes will be shown this autumn at the Royal Academy, and it brings with it the despair, sorrow and numbness of a lifetime of violence.

The drawing is by Leonardo da Vinci. When he drew this compelling head, flanked by a second grimacing profile, in about 1504 he was in his early fifties and had spent much of his life working with soldiers and men of war. When he was about 30, the painter left his native Tuscany and went to Milan, where he applied for a job at the court of Ludovico Sforza, not as an artist but a "master of war". His surviving notebooks show that he did indeed design a staggering variety of bizarre and cruel weapons in Milan, including missiles, machine guns and an armoured car. Then at the start of the 16th century he set off on his travels again, and in 1502 became a military engineer to the terrifying warrior Cesare Borgia.

Those experiences are distilled in the bleak eyes, the despairing scream and the leathery skin – superbly created using soft grey shade – of Leonardo's bitter survivor. He has death in his eyes. What has he seen? What has he done? We see in this portrait the faces and the inner beings of mercenary soldiers Leonardo knew, fighting their battles for power and money. The drawing has a nightmare quality reminiscent of Shakespeare's Macbeth, as the weary soldier screams as he glimpses the evil of his life.

Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of military psychology is astonishingly modern. It speaks to our age of war as truthfully as it spoke to his own. It is fascinating to compare the mask of rage he draws so acutely with the shell-shocked face of a soldier photographed by Don McCullin in Vietnam.Both faces distress us because we are made to imagine what they have seen. In these faces damaged by battle the vast horror of war is suggested more profoundly than in a hundred gory pictures. War destroyed minds then, and it destroys them now, but Leonardo looks into its abyss and keeps a steady drawing hand.

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Art

A review of Aaron Hargreaves' portfolio