Weed and Wisdom: The Growers Bringing Britain's Forgotten Kitchen Plants Back from the Brink

In a walled kitchen garden in Shropshire, between a row of broad beans and a stand of heritage gooseberries, there is a plant that most visitors mistake for a weed and try to pull up. Its leaves are broad and slightly waxy, its habit upright and unfussy, and it has been growing in British kitchen gardens since at least the sixteenth century. It is Good King Henry — Chenopodium bonus-henricus — and it was once considered so useful, so reliably productive, and so nutritious that it needed no particular encouragement to find a place in any serious cook's garden. Then, somewhere in the long twentieth century, it was forgotten. Now it is coming back.

The story of Good King Henry is the story of dozens of plants that once sat at the heart of British rural cooking and were quietly, thoughtlessly lost — not through any single decision, but through the accumulated drift of a food culture that stopped paying attention to what it already had. Sweet cicely, with its anise-scented leaves that could sweeten a tart fruit without a spoonful of sugar. Alexanders, the coastal umbellifer that fed coastal communities from Cornwall to the Orkneys before celery made it redundant. Ground elder, brought by the Romans and eaten as a pot herb for fifteen hundred years before it became the gardener's most-cursed invader. These plants didn't vanish because they were inferior. They vanished because the knowledge of how to use them did.

The Keepers of Old Knowledge

The people reclaiming this knowledge are not, for the most part, academics or food theorists. They are cottage growers, smallholders, market gardeners, and foragers — people whose connection to the land is practical and whose interest in heritage plants is rooted in the same curiosity that drives all good cooking: the desire to understand what is possible with what is available.

Mark Diacono, whose work at Otter Farm in Devon helped reintroduce a generation of British growers to unusual and heritage varieties, has written about the importance of these overlooked plants with characteristic directness. 'We have spent decades importing complexity and novelty,' he has argued, 'when we had perfectly good complexity growing under our feet all along.'

That argument is increasingly being heard. At farmers' markets and farm shops across the country, small growers are beginning to offer bunches of sorrel alongside the salad leaves, pots of sweet cicely for people who want to flavour their stewed rhubarb without sugar, and dried alexanders seed for cooks who want to understand what their coastal ancestors were seasoning their food with. The quantities are small and the audiences are still relatively niche, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

Permaculture and the Perennial Kitchen

One of the reasons these plants are finding a new home is the growing interest in permaculture and perennial growing systems. Most of the herbs and kitchen weeds that fell out of favour are, by their nature, perennial — they come back year after year without replanting, require minimal inputs, and often thrive in the kind of rough, semi-shaded, low-maintenance corners of a garden that annual vegetables find inhospitable.

In a permaculture system, this is not a bug but a feature. Good King Henry will produce edible shoots, leaves, and seeds across an extended season. Sorrel — the sharp, lemony perennial that appears in French cooking but was equally at home in English country kitchens — can be harvested almost year-round in mild conditions. Ground elder, the bane of conventional gardeners, becomes a useful spring green when you stop fighting it and start eating it.

'The whole philosophy shifts when you start thinking about these plants as assets rather than problems,' says Lucy Hutchings, a grower and garden writer whose work on edible perennials has reached a wide audience through social media and her book on the productive cottage garden. 'Ground elder is a case in point. It's essentially free food that requires zero effort, and it tastes good. The only reason we don't eat it is that we forgot to.'

Regional Roots and Cooking Traditions

What gives this revival particular depth is the way these plants connect to specific regional cooking traditions that have been similarly neglected. Alexanders — Smyrnium olusatrum — was a staple of coastal cooking around the British Isles before the widespread cultivation of celery made it redundant. It grows wild along cliff tops and hedgerows near the sea, particularly in the south and west of England, Wales, and coastal Scotland, and its flavour is bold and aromatic in ways that celery only approximates. Chefs working with coastal and foraged ingredients are rediscovering it not as a curiosity but as a genuinely useful kitchen plant.

Sorrel has a stronger survival record — it never entirely disappeared from British gardens — but its use has narrowed considerably from the days when it appeared in everything from spring soups to fish sauces to meat pottages. The French kept it in their culinary vocabulary; we largely let it drift to the edges. Growers supplying restaurants that care about seasonality and provenance are finding that chefs who encounter good sorrel for the first time are often startled by its versatility.

Sweet cicely occupies a particularly interesting position. Its primary virtue — a natural sweetness derived from anethole compounds in its leaves — was practically useful in an era when sugar was expensive and honey was the primary sweetener for most rural households. Added to sharp fruit during cooking, it reduces the need for sugar significantly. As interest in lower-sugar cooking grows, this is a property that is beginning to attract genuine culinary attention.

A Kitchen Conversation with the Past

There is something quietly radical about the idea that the answer to a more interesting, more sustainable, more rooted British cuisine might be found not in imports or innovations but in the plants that have been growing in our hedgerows and neglected garden corners for centuries. It requires a willingness to learn — to go back to old herbals, to talk to older growers, to taste things that are unfamiliar and sit with the unfamiliarity long enough to understand it.

The growers doing this work are not precious about it. They are, by and large, practical people who grow things because growing things makes sense, and who have found in these forgotten plants a combination of utility, resilience, and flavour that the modern seed catalogue rarely provides.

Good King Henry, back in its Shropshire bed, is producing its first young shoots of the season. Someone will pick them this afternoon, blanch them briefly in salted water, and eat them with butter and a little vinegar, the way people have been eating them here for four hundred years. It is not a revolutionary act. It is simply a sensible one.