Wild Food: A Complete Guide for Foragers

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His entry on the Death Cap, “the most deadly fungus known”, included the alarming information that, if ingested, an initial period of prolonged and violent vomiting and diarrhoea and severe abdominal pain is typically “followed by an apparent recovery, when the victim may ... think his ordeal over. Within a few days death results from kidney and liver failure.” Phillips, Roger, and Jacqui Hurst. 1983. Wild food: [a unique photographic guide to finding, cooking and eating wild plants, mushrooms and seaweed]. London: Pan Books. Alastair Little insists on using only ‘the first young nettle of spring, dazzlingly green and with a unique, peppery flavour’. Phillips has been a natural nonconformist. Three months into his national service in the RAF in Canada, he says, he somehow persuaded an air vice marshal to let him go home on the basis that he didn’t want to be trained to kill people. He later gave up work as an art director at the ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, to become a freelance photographer, concentrating on plants. His guiding philosophy has always been: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it.” That spirit has taken him all over the world – adventures in wild food that are celebrated in his latest book, The Worldwide Forager. He went on to write over 30 more books after that, including The Worldwide Forager in 2020, and became especially famous for his work on mushrooms. He could go into the woods at the Good Life festival and return with a huge array of brightly coloured and edible fungi – and a trail of adoring fans.

In 1975 Phillips began his life’s major work of photographing and publishing pictures of the world’s garden plants. Using modern photographic techniques, he set out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals. His first book ‘Wild Flowers of Britain’ was a huge success, selling 400,000 copies in the first year. He wrote more than 30 additional books (often with his co-author Martyn Rix) selling over 4.5 million copies worldwide. I suggest that, like the hunter-gatherers, Phillips must see a different countryside to the rest of us when he goes for a walk in the woods; so much to eat for a start … The milk means that there’s no need to add cream of any stripe to the finished dish, though it looks so pleasing against the green of the finished dish that you might like to anyway. Or pop in some stale bread fried in leftover bacon fat, as White recommends. Thrifty, warming and delicious: what more could you ask for at this time of year? Perfect nettle soup I usually siphoned off a gallon of grape juice and added all the yeast to that for 24-48 hrs to get a good starter culture going. He presented two six-part television series, 1994's The Quest for the Rose for BBC Television and, in 1995, The 3,000 Mile Garden for PBS. [2] [3]He wrote and presented two six-part TV series on gardening (BBC & Channel 4). Famed for his ebullient personality and garish red glasses, he has become a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening. The oldest recipe I try, from Florence White’s 1932 collection Good Things in England, and with an attribution that implies it may be Victorian, boils the nettles for 10 minutes before adding them to the soup base, while Little blanches his for just 60 seconds. Chef Paul Gayler’s book Great Homemade Soups sits squarely in the middle of that, at five minutes, while Phillips just adds the leaves raw to the soup, where they simmer for a quarter of an hour.

The sale of customised goods or perishable goods, sealed audio or video recordings, or software, which has been opened. You need a sugar for the yeast to ferment. Begin with a specific gravity of 1.095 to finish at 0.995. In 1970 he met the book designer David Larkin, for whom he did numerous book covers. It was Larkin who signed him up to publish his Wild Flowers of Britain (1977) with Pan/Macmillan. Phillips trained at Chelsea School of Art from where he entered a career in advertising culminating in the position of art director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. He left O&M to start a career as a freelance photographer, winning many awards before turning his photographic talents to the world of natural history.

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Plants for Europe's Graham Spencer said: "So many great books came from Roger Phillips pen and camera. I have several on my shelf, still referred to regularly."

Phillips was best known as an expert on roses and fungi.He was Honorary Garden Manager at Ecclestone Square in London and in the 2010 New Year's Honours Listwas awarded the MBE for services to London Garden Squares. He shudders at the thought. “We are going to be dust long enough,” he says. And then he brightens. “According to a French mycologist there is a mushroom that grows only on the human brain, in graveyards. I suppose because they are uniquely nutritious.” He laughs at the idea. “I don’t know if it’s a comforting thought – but there it is.” OFM

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Despite all the changes he has witnessed at first hand as a result of factory farming, he remains an optimist. He believes not only that we may see a necessary revival in sustainability, but that some of the more miraculous properties of fungi in particular might yet help us to fix the damage already done to the planet. “Fungi have been used to break down oil spills,” he says. “I think they will have a role to play in ridding the world of plastic.”