Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

FOOD systems...

Urban gleaners harvest the streets

Fiona Campbell harvests the Australian bushfood, Illawarra plum (Podocarus elatus) in a park at Ramsgate, southern Sydney

She takes a bite then picks more of the fruit for the children.

This act of urban foraging took place in Stanmore, a matrix of wide streets and Federation style duplexes in Sydney's Inner West.

Urban foragers find the plum planted as a park specimen throughout the city. A cluster on the campus of UNSW, a single tree in the park near Ramsgate shopping centre and a number in Hyde Park, in the centre of the city itself, are only a few of the places it is found.

A city of edible natives

It was early evening. The proprietor of the little cafe on the edge of the pocket park outside North Sydney's Stanton Library was busy serving customers when she looked out to see a man picking something from a tree. She watched as he reached up to pluck a spray of magenta-coloured berries from the lower branches. Curious, she walked over.

"Hello. What are you doing?", she asked.

"I'm picking Magenta Lillypilly. You can eat them and make a tasty sauce from them", he replied.

"Oh, I didn't know that", she responded.

"They're a bush food that is ready to eat in late Autumn. Maybe you could use them in your cooking in the restaurant", he said.

The Magenta Lillypilly, known to botanists as Syzygium paniculatum, is just one of the native species familiar to the city's bush food aficionados. Since Australian bush foods were popularised in books and in the ABC television series Bush Tucker Man in the 1990s, urban foragers have added them to their list of found delicacies.

Edible trees have been established by landscapers and home gardeners, most of whom are unaware of the food value of what they consider to be ornamental plants. An example is the Small-Leaf Lillypilly, Syzygium leuhmannii, favoured by landscapers for its compact, upright form and copper coloured new growth. The small, pink, bell-shaped fruit can be used as a food in the same way as Magenta Lillypilly. A row has been planted on the southern side of St George Hospital at Kogarah and already bear fruit.

An impressive demonstration of how edible species are planted for their landscaping values is found in a park planted to the edible Pine Nut (Pinis pinea) at San Souci on the shores of Sydney's Botany Bay. A native of the Mediterranean region, the pines were established in the late-1930s to be transplanted as an avenue along the shoreline. The Second World War intervened, however, and the pines were never planted out. They grew where they had been planted all those decades ago and today form a mature forest of a type uncommon in the Sydney region. In 2004, Rockdale Council removed some diseased individuals and replanted with seedlings of the same species.

A bayside forest of stone pine (Pinus pinea) at San Souci, Sydney. The tree yields edible pine nuts eaten raw or used in cooking

Morag Gamble harvests macadamia nuts from a street planting, Windsor, Brisbane

It is the same in other cities too - a walk along a paricular street in Windsor, Brisbane, will disclose edible Macadamia nuts growing as street trees.

Foragers have only to walk the city's parks and beaches to find more edibles. Queensland's Bunya Pine, which drops a two-kilogram cluster of seeds, edible raw or roasted, is not uncommon in the cities. There is a specimen in the bushland reserve in Scarborough Park, not far from the Botany Bay shoreline, and another in the Botanic Gardens, but don't let the gardeners catch you foraging there.

Then there is New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides), a rambling vine with a succulent, heart-shaped leaf native to the Sydney region. Edible when cooked and tasting much like spinach, it is found on the dunes behind beaches. Sydney's coastline offers a range of other edible plants such as the fruit of Pig Face, but they are usually not in sufficient quantity or do not have the taste to make collecting them worthwhile.

The difficulty of edible landscaping

A landscape architect, at the time working for Leichhardt Council, found this out when she proposed that fruit trees be planted in a council park. Local people were not ready for such a revolutionary idea, though she did manage to establish olive trees as a cultural link to the Italians that settled Leichhardt in the post-World War Two period.

The idea of the widescale planting of edible street and park trees was briefly discussed at a global enviromental conference in Newcastle in 1996 when a planner from a Western Sydney council brought up issues that would have to be dealt with if the idea is to catch on. They include maintenance, harvesting rights and pest control. He did not oppose the idea but suggested that councils may do better to wait for a request from the community rather than plant edible trees themselves.

It is interesting that urban foragers in Australia have not turned their interest into something more profitable. Overseas, foragers have located unused fruit trees, such as citrus, growing in suburban gardens but whose fruits are not harvested. They make arrangements with householders to harvest trees to distribute or sell the fruit or make jams and sauces from it.

One day, perhaps, the urban forager will be able to harvest Macadamia street trees and fruit and nuts from groves in city parks. Until then, they will have to satisfy themselves with fortuitious finds such as that mulberry tree in suburban Stanmore.