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NOTTINGHAM IS FULL OF SWEET CHESTNUT TREES,


THERE ARE LOADS OF PATCHES OF WILD GARLIC AND MUSHROOMS SO I’D OFTEN JUST HEAD OUT AND COME BACK WITH A BACKPACK FULL OF EDIBLES.


“We were just shoved on a bus, at quite a young age really, and were taught about plants, trees and nature. I absolutely loved it and didn’t want to come home,” she remembers.


Back at home her dad was also into fishing and she’d often tag along with him, guide book in hand, and whilst he and her brother fished, she’d be wandering around learning things.


“Liverpool in the 70s and early 80s wasn’t the most outdoorsy of places but there were still derelict sites that hadn’t been redeveloped, where scrub plants and berries would grow. I remember picking blackberries in places like that and making jam for one of my Brownie badges.


“As time went on though I could see it wasn’t cool to be interested in this kind of stuff so I sort of hid it for a while.”


Leaving school, Kerry went to Nottingham Trent University to study for a degree in equine science, horses being another passion of hers.


“Living in Nottingham was completely different. It was an agricultural college in the middle of the countryside and others there also had an interest in the natural world.”


Watch any cookery show these days and you will hear chefs talking about using foraged ingredients in their recipes. Be it woodland berries, coastal seaweeds, fungi or green shoots, they are all being presented on our restaurant plates at a premium price. But how does anyone know which of the myriad of plant life around us is edible and which could potentially make us ill? Kerry Bowness aims to help us know the difference and make our cooking more exciting….and cost effective.


Growing up in Liverpool, Kerry always loved the outdoors and remembers being the child who always had her fingers in mud, getting excited about wildlife and plants. Watching David Bellamy and David Attenborough gave her a love of the natural world but she recalls it wasn’t really the coolest of interests in urban Liverpool.


Aside from watching nature programmes on TV, she thinks her passion for the outdoors was really cemented when as a schoolgirl of just eight years old she went on a week-long residential visit to her school’s environmental centre Colomendy just outside of Mold, in Wales.


They say necessity is the mother of invention and it was as a poor student that Kerry came to realise she could drastically reduce her food bill if she could eat what was growing naturally outside.


“I lived in a house share the whole time I was at Uni so I tried to grow a few bits in the garden but I came to realise there was other stuff just growing wild, naturally in our garden and all around us that I could eat.


“Nottingham is full of sweet chestnut trees, there are loads of patches of wild garlic and mushrooms so I’d often just head out and come back with a backpack full of edibles.”


After graduating, a new job took her further still away from the countryside she loved to London but at weekends she’d often spend her time back in Nottingham. It was during this time she become more interested in understanding foraged food.


“I found a book which talked about how the Europeans went all over the world bringing back plants to our scientists.


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LOCAL PEOPL E FORAGING COURS E COMPANY


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