I first came across Strawberry Trees (Latin Arbutus unedo) when I was living in Spain, over 5 years ago. They have them in Madrid because the city’s coat of arms is a bear picking a tree strawberry. But they are tall and I never managed to reach one of the fruits (although also I might not have been there at the right time of year, they are ripe in November and December.)

When I lived in London, I found one in someone’s garden near Epping Forest and found a few ripe fruits on the ground on the street. They were delicious, with a flavour and texture like apricot jam. I always wanted to find another tree to eat more.

A few days ago we found a few Strawberry Trees on the island of Cres (Croatia), most of the fruit wasn’t ripe although we found a few good ones. Then yesterday we saw loads of trees with ripe fruit along the side of the road so we found somewhere to park and found some trees away from the road with loads of ripe fruits. I ate loads, when ripe they are so delicious. Ripe ones are generally dark red and very squashy, generally we found the best ones were on the ground under the trees.

But a little while later I started feeling ill. Thankfully not too bad, just a bit of nausea, but it did go on for a good few hours. We got the ferry back to the mainland and I felt really bad during the journey, thankfully it was only a 20 minute crossing.

So I did some more research, and some people say the when the fruits are over-ripe they start to form alcohol and you can get drunk from them. I didn’t feel like I was drunk though. Interestingly Jolita was fine, although she probably didn’t eat as many as me.

So if you do find a Strawberry Tree, go easy on them!

This article was originally published in the Spring 2009 issue of the Funky Raw magazine.

I regularly get asked what books I would recommend about wild foods, so here are my thoughts.

Lets start with the classic British wild food books are Food For Free and Wild Food.

Food for Free, by Richard Mabey, comes in several versions; one with colour photos, one with hand drawn illustrations and a pocket version (with less plants). I have the edition with colour photos, some of the photos are good, but many are not clear – if you already know the plant they help to jog your memory but are not for identification. This edition also devotes a lot of space to recipes (cooked, so not of much interest).

Wild Food by Roger Phillips covers sea food as well as plants and devotes even more space to cooked recipes so I’ve not purchased this book.

The Neighbourhood Forager by Robert K Henderson is an American book which has a lot of useful detail about a smaller number of wild foods but not great images for identification. Most of the information is also relevant for the UK.

As the number of wild food books available is limited, I started looking at other books about wild plants. I found that the books below work well in conjunction with a specific wild food book, or the PFAF website (www.pfaf.org) where you can look up whether a particular plant is edible or not. It even gives an edibility rating – some plants are edible but are hard to digest or don’t taste good so this gives a quick evaluation.

Wild Flowers of Britain by Roger Phillips is an excellent identification guide. Each plant is photographed on a plain background so you can see it clearly. This book is not specifically about edibles, although it does mention that some plants are edible.

This is probably my favourite book for identifying wild plants, and it looks like you can get second hand copies quite cheaply on Amazon now.

Wild Flowers by Neil Fletcher is very good for identifying plants, each plant has a photo of the plant, a photo of the plant in it’s habitat, a closeup of the leaves and a closeup of the flower plus text explaining identifying features.

Another quick tip to help with identification – if you go to www.images.google.com and enter the plant name you will get lots of photos (although this is not always accurate, always double check before eating anything!)