How one writer learned the lesson of the Honorable Harvest the hard way
WORDS | SARAH GOLIBART GORMAN PHOTOS | LISA ARCHER
If soiling your pants at age three isn’t cute, then soiling your pants at age 30 definitely isn’t. But there I was on the leather recliner, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead in hand, a belly full of sweet chestnuts — at least what I thought were sweet chestnuts — and pants full of problems. How did I get here?
One golden September afternoon in Harrisonburg, Virginia, my neighbor, her daughter and I were walking downtown. After turning a corner onto South Main Street, we were halted by dozens of glistening, tawny nuts littering the sidewalk. Time stopped. The nuts were so plentiful, falling from the tree, plunking on to the soft grass, rolling into the road. I felt like one of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. You know — the scene where the kids are hiding in the kitchen and the raptors are menacingly still, using every sense to stalk their prey. My neighbor walked on, uninterested, but I bent to begin gathering as many nuts as I could hold.
That’s how it’s been with me and foraging. I feel euphoric, high, when I stumble upon some unexpected chanterelles or a wineberry patch. I remember when it all started. Early pandemic, I was on a run when I spotted a forgotten stump bursting with gray oyster mushrooms. I remembered an old chestnut (coming back to those) about only taking one third of a wild growing plant (more on that too), so I plucked a portion of the fungi and promptly ran home to confirm the identity of my stash.
In high school, my friend’s grandfather died from eating a poisonous mushroom while we were away at basketball camp, so I was not messing around. I checked, crosschecked, spore printed, sniffed for oyster’s telltale anise scent, examined gills and stem until my hunch was confirmed. After that buttery, garlicky sauté, I wasn’t the same. I ordered Walt Sturgeon’s Appalachian Mushrooms: A Field Guide and pledged myself to the 100% positive identification club. The saying goes, “There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters. But no old, bold mushroom hunters.”
But that September afternoon, I was a bit too bold in the nut department. When foraging tree crops, it’s important to analyze the tree’s location, the texture and color of its bark, the leaf shape, and the fruit and nut features. Beyond this scientific checklist lies the wisdom of Robin Wall Kimmerer, writer, scientist, professor and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she shares the practice of the “Honorable Harvest,” the indigenous principles that my earlier “rule of three,” harvesting only one third of a plant, descends from.
Kimmerer begins her chapter describing an early spring walk in the woods. She spots vibrant patches of ramps, and instead of giving herself over to winter-starved euphoria, she ”resist[s] the urge to answer their call immediately.” Instead, she introduces herself to the verdant bounty, “in case they’ve forgotten,” and “ask[s] their permission to harvest, inquiring politely if they would be willing to share.” I thought about how the tree had probably laughed at my folly, the breeze agitating its branches like a shaking of the head.
I didn’t need to collect 11 pounds of nuts that day, but I did. Thinking I’d hit the jackpot. I biked home, bag overflowing, and got to work. Processing chestnuts is laborious. Each nut must be scored, boiled, and roasted before it’s rendered into soft, slightly sweet starchiness. As they boiled in my massive stock pot, I couldn’t wait to taste the chestnuts. I dreamed of them baking beneath roasts, floating amidst miso and mushrooms in soups, and whipped into sweet creaminess in desserts.
After boiling, I spread the chestnuts on baking sheets and roasted them until the hulls began to peel away like flower petals. I delicately opened a hot nut to taste. Bitter. So bitter. Almost like soap. The red flag was attached to the pole. Thinking I must have not roasted them long enough, I slide the trays back in the oven. Another taste. Bitter. The red flag was now at half mast. Back in the oven for more roasting. One more taste test, a tendril of hope hanging on, my memory began working in reverse, the sidewalk scattered with nuts, bright green husks, hand-shaped leaves. Was that right? The red flag was now flying high, mocking me as panic set in.
A quick Google search introduced me to the horse chestnut, the conker, the buckeye, Aesculus hippocastanum, cousin of maple, lychee and soapberry. Essentially, I had eaten about a handful of soap. The shame that washed over me was reminiscent of the soapy-mouthed times of my childhood when I had talked back to my mother or said something nasty to my brothers. But this time, I had administered my own punishment.
Raw horse chestnuts contain a significant amount of a poison called esculin, which can be fatal if eaten in large amounts. I’m still here to tell this tale due to the extensive cooking I did when preparing the chestnuts and the fact that I didn’t eat more than a handful. Besides the gastrointestinal distress I experienced, symptoms of poisoning can include weakness, confusion, muscle twitching, difficulty breathing and a rapid or irregular heartbeat. Despite these ill effects, horse chestnut extracts are used throughout Europe and increasingly in the U.S. to treat a variety of ailments.
The roots of using horse chestnut as medicine begin with indigenous peoples. According to the Native American Ethnobotany Database, a collection of information about plants used by indigenous peoples of North America, the Iroquois used a compound of powdered horse chestnut roots as an analgesic, or pain reliever, and as a pulmonary aid for chest pains, while the Mohegan and Shinnecock carried horse chestnut in their pockets as a remedy for rheumatism.
The Shenandoah Valley has been home to indigenous peoples for over 15,000 years, with ancestors of the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Algonquian cultures caretaking the forests. The Monacan Nation established permanent villages and farmed the mountain slopes using a system of terraces. The Monacan and other tribes continue to protect their ancestral lands, working to divert pipelines away from sacred sites, restore agroforestry, and revive the plant knowledge I was sorely lacking.
When you hold a husked horse chestnut and sweet chestnut next to each other, they are nearly indistinguishable to a nut layperson like myself, shellacked and auburn with an oblong scar on the bottom. Except that sweet chestnut is shaped more like a Hershey kiss with a little tassel on top, while horse chestnut’s top is more round and smooth. Then there’s the difference in husks. They’re nothing alike. The husk of sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa, looks like a sea urchin, with cactus-like spikes all around. A horse chestnut husk looks like a spiky, chartreuse golf ball that practically shreeks, “Don’t eat me!” But I did. And paid the price.
If the husks don’t distinguish them, then the leaves do. Horse chestnut leaves are palmate, with five leaflets fanned out like fingers on a hand. Sweet chestnut leaves are long, serrated and branch off alternately. If I had only slowed down to actually observe the tree, identify it, and be in conversation with it before I loaded up on toxic nuts, I wouldn’t have had to throw away my underwear.
Early summer offered me a chance to do penance for my chestnut crimes and introduce myself to a new friend, shagbark hickory. The name “hickory” derives from the Powhatan or Algonquian word “pawcohiccora,” “pokahichary,” “pawcohiccora,” or something similar, meaning hickory milk. In the same family as pecan, shagbark hickory, or Carya ovata, is a tall tree with shaggy bark peeling away from the trunk in strips like a piñata.
While the nuts are edible and quite sweet and delicious, I sought the bark to make shagbark hickory syrup, a simple syrup flavored with the smoky, earthy bark of the shagbark hickory tree. Often referred to as “poor man’s maple syrup,” the sweet liquid is easy to make and can be made all year round, free from maple’s late winter constraints. It requires no special equipment and comes together in an hour, as opposed to days of collecting and boiling maple syrup.
Tribes like the Winnebago, Ponca, Pawnee, Omaha, and Dakota made a sweetener from the bark or sap of shagbark hickory and enjoyed the nuts in soup, plain, or with honey. The Chippewa steamed fresh, small shoots, making an inhalant for headaches, and used the wood for bows. The Delaware and Ontario tribes utilized bark tea as a gynecological aid, while the Iroquois used the bark to make a poultice for arthritis. These tribes also used nut oil for hair care and as an insecticide and fresh nuts for baby food, beverages, bread, cakes and more. The Potawatomi, Kimmerer’s people, and others valued the nuts for winter storage and used the wood for making bows, arrows, and snowshoes.
To locate a stand, I reached out to my friend Jonathan McRay, farmer, facilitator, writer and caretaker of Silver Run Forest Farm, a riparian nursery, woodland collective and folk school located just outside of Harrisonburg. He wasn’t in town to introduce me to the trees and instead was visiting Ekvn-Yefolecv (ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh), a Muskogee ecovillage in Alabama that is reclaiming thousands of acres of ancestral land. Jon was in talks with them about a contract to grow 10,000 trees for a restoration project.
When Jon and his co-caretaker Cornelius began Silver Run Forest Farm, they incorporated a CSA into their business model. Not the weekly box-of-vegetables kind of CSA, but rather as an acronym for Community Solidarity Agroforestry, where, through a one-time gift or monthly subscription, folks fund tree donations to places like Ekvn-Yefolecv. Since 2020, Silver Run has given away upwards of 12,000 tree cuttings, embodying the Honorable Harvest’s tenant of sharing and caretaking.
Jon instructed us to walk up the grass path that he manages with a scythe, winding past his home and nursery; past the old barn occupied by three snakes, Huey, Dewey, and Louie; across the creek where he said a few hickories live.
I scouted for shaggy bark while my friend skillfully scanned for shagbark’s pinnate leaves, looking for 5 to 7 smaller leaflets growing in pairs on each side of a main stem, with one leaflet at the very top. Amidst the oaks, black gum and poplar we found a family of shagbarks.
Taking Kimmerer’s advice, we bashfully greeted the tree and asked permission to take some of its bark. The loose, peeling strips seemed to us an answer of assent. We selected sections free from bugs or moss, snapping them off, taking just enough for our syrup recipe. When we left the forest, I noticed that my typical foraging euphoria was replaced with a deep calm, a connectedness, a gratitude for the gift the shagbark gave us. I felt confident that our harvest would settle well, both with the trees and in my stomach.
For more information on forest farming and wild harvesting in Appalachia, visit asdevelopment.org
This article first appeared in our 2024 Fall Issue “Under the Canopy”
