Green Options

When autumn, lovely autumn, swings round these here parts once again, so many things start to fall: leaves, acorns, pine cones, temperatures, humidity levels… Although spring and summer get the most credit as seasons for bountiful harvests, autumn has its bounty, too.

Amongst nature’s many freely offered wild edibles, we finicky humans have overlooked a vast number of scrumptious delicacies as we have evolved (or devolved) from wilderness gatherers to grocery-store, fast-food drive-thru, vending-machine gatherers. To our own detriment.

Now, summertime may be regaled as the season for sweet foraging, for then the many berries are bursting with sugary savory sweetness in bite-size bits. But autumn has its sweetness, too, in particular thanks to one oft-ignored tidbit: the persimmon.

Let me clarify: The wild persimmon of which I speak is the American persimmon, Disopyros virginiana. This is not the baseball-size, bright yellow, imported Japanese/Chinese kaki persimmon (Diospyros kaki you can find in grocery stores. No, D. virginiana is native to the American Southeast, though it has found its way out to the Midwest and even up towards the Northeast of these United States as well. Its fruit is much more humble in size, like a little ping pong ball, and much subtler in color, a sort of pale orange blending into rosy pink and purple depending on its ripeness. It is more sensitive as well, hence its absence from grocery store produce sections.

So to experience the wild persimmon, you must head out into the autumn woods and keep your eye up in the canopy or, alternatively, down on the ground for fallen edible offerings. Then you may discover the lovely American persimmon in all its autumn fecundity.

For this Fourth of July, I chose to celebrate a day of independence by stressing out to prepare for a holiday party, nor by figuring out which fireworks show to go to, nor by basking in the presence of President Bush during his visit to Monticello here in Charlottesville.

No, for this Fourth of July, I tapped into the American spirit of freedom by going wild and getting out into the wild: I went out foraging for wild berries.

Luckily for me this was pretty easy, given the fact that I live in the country and have been walking by a seemingly endless stretch of wineberry bushes (and a few blackberry bushes) growing conveniently along the gravel drive. Oh, the tension of temptation has been building for so, so long now as I have watched the bushes form their little fuzzy pods, the pods pop open with the unripe berries peeping out, the berries growing redder and redder like little organic rubies building up their brilliance….

So on this day, at long last, I declared my independence from self-restraint and heroic patience by diving into the (thorny!) berry patches and going wild…and pickin’ pickin’ pickin’ away.