IT WAS JUST A SMALL, everyday incident. The woman is walking along Northumberland Avenue with two primary school children bobbing along behind her. Suddenly, she stops and reaches up and plucks something from a tree.

She takes a bite then picks more of the fruit for the children. The three of them are still plucking and eating the mulberries when along comes another woman with children, also on their way home from school. They join in the feast. Soon both parties go on their way, their bellies full and fingers stained red.

Urban fruit ready for the picking. A mango tree in a park at Kangaroo Point, Brisbane.

This act of urban foraging took place in Stanmore, a matrix of wide streets and Federation style duplexes in Sydney’s Inner West. But that mulberry tree that overhangs the footpath is not the only foraging opportunity. Close by is a street along which the indigenous Illawarra Plum (Podocarpus elatus) has been planted. This is a peculiar plant. A tree of medium height native to Sydney’s rainforest gullies, it produces its seed on the outside, rather than the inside of the dark red fruit. Best of all, the IIlawarra Plum is edible. Urban foragers know that they can eat it raw or make it into a sauce or jam. There’s a cluster on the campus of UNSW and a number in Hyde Park in the centre of the city itself.

The Illawarra Plum in an indigenous bush food sometimes planted in parks and as a street tree. The purple fruit are edible.

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 first popularised in books and in the ABC television series, the 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.

Travel down to the shores of Botany Bay at Sans Souci and you encounter an entire park of edible pine nuts (Pinus pinea). A native of the Mediterranean region, the pines were established in the late-1930s to be transplanted as an avenue along the shoreline. But the Second World War intervened and the pines were never planted out. They grew where they had been planted as a nursery and today they form a mature forest of a type unique in the Sydney region. Flocks of parrots, rather than people, seem to be the main beneficiary of this accidental plantation.

San Souci's pine nut trees are an accidental planting on the shores of Botany Bay.

And more edibles

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 Royal Botanic Gardens, but don’t let the gardeners catch you foraging there.

A woman searches for seed from wild New Zealand spinach. The edible creeper occurs as a wild harvest adjacent to beaches and is planted in bush regeneration and landscaping works.

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. It is also found near the pavilion on Manly Scenic Walkway, where a woman has been seen collecting its seed for planting at home, and in the regenerated bushland landscaping behind Clovelly Beach in the Eastern Suburbs.

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 magenta lillypilly is just one of the lillypilly species found in city parks and gardens. The fruit of this bush food is edible.

The difficulty of edible landscaping

Apart from the handful of guerilla gardeners active in Sydney and in other cities, the edible landscaping of public parks is an idea whose time is yet to come.

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 a grove of olive trees as a cultural link to the Italians that settled Leichhardt in the post-World War Two period.

The subtropical fruit loquat is found in private gardens from where it overhangs the footpath, making it available to urban gleaners.

The idea of the widescale planting of edible street and park trees was briefly discussed at a global environmental 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. The closest to this in Australia is the Urban Orchard project at CERES, an idea that has spread to Adelaide.

One day, perhaps, the urban forager will be able to harvest Macadamia street trees and other 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.