The elderly Chinese lady from up the street is in my front yard again. She speaks about three words of English; I speak no Cantonese. We communicate largely in mime. My front yard, I should point out, is a haggard spot—just dry earth and weeds, except for a clump of tarty, hello-ducky pink peonies under the window. My neighbour isn’t after the flowers. She sees me watching and straightens up, triumphantly brandishing a handful of dandelion greens and some thorny wolfberry stems. She grins and nods with enthusiasm. “Soup!” she announces. I smile and give her the thumbs-up. Sure. Take ’em. Knock yourself out.

Homegrown food is always a treat, but food found in the wild—even in the unkempt streets of Chinatown—has a special savour. When those Mesopotamian Mr. McGregors invented farming, back in the day, they swapped the fun and uncertainty of foraging for hard labour and mere reliability. Traditional hunter-gatherers must have stood and tutted. You can’t just go and domesticate bitter vetch, favouring one grass over another, playing Ninkhursag with the gene pool, without disrupting nature. Yet farming caught on. It’s only now, 10,000 years later, that wild plants are back in vogue. Beginning in May, Toronto gourmets scour the high-end green­grocers and farmers’ markets for the first wild leeks, wild garlic, wild ginger, the tender fiddleheads, the magical morels. Later it’s chanterelles and wild blueberries. Each gastronome has his zealously guarded patch—the Harvest Wagon, perhaps, or a shaded corner of Whole Foods.

But the best place to go is the Dufferin Grove organic farmers’ market, where 25 or so little stalls spring up like lobster mushrooms every Thursday afternoon. On the southern peri­meter, not far from the wood-burning oven, Jonathan Forbes sells the fresh wild plants and fungi he foraged that morning in the woods around his home near Creemore, as well as a selection of the 80-odd preserved wild foods he puts up in bottles, packets and jars. Lean and fit at 63, Forbes stands behind his table, surveying the crowd, answering questions with a discreet merri­ment that is never condescending. Some customers make a beeline for the ramps; others squint with curiosity at the bags of dried mushrooms, the jars of crunchy yellow cattail hearts that taste like fresh hearts of palm, the tawny sumac jelly, the spruce tips that look like bristly green caterpillars but have a uniquely resinous lemon flavour. No one else markets such a range of exotic Canadiana—our top chefs are Forbes’s biggest customers—so perhaps I can be forgiven for imagining he was the president of a large and influential company when I first saw his spiffy packaging eight years ago. The idea makes Forbes laugh. He had been in business only a year or two at the time, and there was nothing in the bank. “I sat in my kitchen wondering if I’d made a huge mistake,” he remembers. “Then it occurred to me that I’d been eating wild morels every meal for the last three weeks. Maybe things weren’t so bad.”

They are a little better today. A woman in a Sarah Harmer T-shirt picks her way through the crowd and Forbes makes a sale: a bunch of wild leeks, some wild garlic, a handful of fiddleheads, plus a small bottle of thick, black birch syrup, an unctuous treasure that tastes of caramel, licorice and aged balsamic. Forbes might make $150 this afternoon—it’s just worth his while to drive to the market every week.

“Are there any morels?” someone asks.

“No. Sorry. I had a trespasser in my patch yesterday. He got the lot.” Forbes shoots me a smile. The trespasser was me.