♪♪ -Spring arrives in Vermont like a whispered promise.

After months of winter's grip, the forest floor comes alive with an ancient rhythm.

The same cycle that has sustained life here for thousands of years but continues to vanish.

-It's time for us to think about what are the other values that we can emphasize here in this place?

What makes this place different from other parts of our landscape?

-For one, these woods offer a wild feast of foraging opportunities.

But it's more than food.

It's a connection to the land, to the seasons, and to a way of knowing that grows deeper every day.

-The intelligence is right in front of us.

-With this forest greening up, it attracts bright minds inspired to breathe new life into local ingredients... -That's...parsley.

-Parsley.

So this is the sorrel.

-...and to honor the rites of spring.

My name is Kevin Chap.

And for me, wild foods aren't just a luxury.

They're a way of life.

As an environmentalist, educator, and professional forager, I know the best ingredients are still waiting to be discovered.

You just need to know where to look.

♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from the Vermont International Film Foundation, bringing the world to Vermont through film and supporting filmmakers in Vermont and beyond for 40 years.

And with support from... ♪♪ -[ Whistles ] Come on, buddy.

[ Whistles ] Every spring since I was a kid, I've roamed these woods in Stockbridge, Vermont, in search of the new life that renews itself this time of year, offering great foraging but also rejuvenating me with each new discovery.

♪♪ Well, here is a great site.

This is called Ostrich fern, better known as Fiddlehead fern or Shuttlecock fern.

So this is a great early season forageable, and it's easily identifiable by its very rich green texture.

And then also this golden frond or foil that grows upon it.

Now, there's 114 different varieties of fern in Vermont.

Only five of them are edible.

But the one that we're always after is Ostrich fern.

♪♪ ♪♪ Alright.

So this is kind of a perfect example of one of these early ramp or wild leek patches.

Unfortunately this is just starting to establish itself.

So this isn't a patch that I would necessarily harvest yet.

It's going to take about another eight years for it to really proliferate.

It's unmistakable.

Just garlic and onion and kind of all around here now with the early morning sun coming up, you can just get that aroma.

So it tells us we're on the right track.

♪♪ This is a great place to harvest from.

Typically a two-frond plant coming out of one stem.

A great way to indicate also is this red or purplish stem color.

Now, not all of them have that, but the easiest way to identify these is by their smell.

And just that deep garlic and oniony smell, which is kind of wafting all over the valley from that early morning sun.

I've been picking off of this patch since I was a kid, and it's actually gotten bigger.

So that shows that if you take care of Mother Nature, if you don't overharvest, don't take more than what you need, that you can still have an amazing patch and have very little impact on nature.

So we're going to get to harvesting here.

Yeah.

There you go.

Let me go ahead... ♪♪ Mm.

That's garlicky.

The wild foods of Vermont tell only part of spring's story.

Just as these ancient plants emerge from winter's sleep, human hands are also stirring the soil, tending gardens where wild and cultivated merge.

The forest teaches us about abundance.

But the garden shows us partnership.

♪♪ At the Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont, Chef Sammi Gay has created a kitchen and garden that celebrates the intersection of wild and cultivated, local and global.

-And that's...parsley.

-Parsley.

So this is the sorrel.

But it started bolting a little bit too.

Super lemony.

Try.

[ Chuckles ] -Oh, my God, that's so good.

-Yeah.

It's nice and bright.

-Wow.

-When I first started cooking professionally in 2018, there was a lot of identity-based cooking.

You know, everyone's like, "I'm making the food of my people" and these certain ways and everyone's like, "What kind of food do you make?"

And I'm like, "Well..." I never, like, knew how to describe myself.

My friend a couple years ago was like, "You make American food."

And I was like, "Whoa.

Excuse me?"

-What does that mean?

-I was like, "Oh, you're so right" because a lot of it is so play space and site specific, where I want to, like, capture the essence of the place that I'm at.

I really try to use what's around me.

And, like, that's a part of my ethos.

-You are so in touch with what's happening here seasonally and also, like, just on this landscape out here.

-Absolutely.

-But I mean, I think a lot of people miss that is like, how do you eat this?

You know, like pheasant.

How do you eat this quail egg?

How do you eat this radish?

It's just on your plate.

Like, show me how you eat that.

-Totally.

Yeah.

I think, again, a lot of people are disconnected in the food system, whether it's from where their food is coming from, produce-wise and animal-wise.

I want people to engage with their food.

Like, I love when people use their hands.

I want people to, like, take a minute and pause.

And, like, I like to let it linger.

You know, all of it, especially flavor-wise too.

Like, I'm a really big fan of subtlety and nuance.

-We were just talking about bitter.

-Oh, yeah.

-That's a flavor profile that's, like, diminishing on our tongue.

-Absolutely.

-And, like, our palate is actually devolving at this point because of our food system.

-I harvested a bunch of spruce tips.

I use them in a couple different ways.

I, like, fermented some of the asparagus over there with spruce tips.

I made a spruce maple.

This one fleeting moment in time where you can get these spruce tips, where they're bright green and edible, and it's like a short window.

And I was so excited to see that here in early May when I first got here.

It's also about, like, time capsuling and capturing the moment and the essence.

-While Sammi nurtures cultivated abundance in her garden, the wild forest holds its own secrets.

Deep in these mountains, ancient relationships unfold between trees and the creatures that depend on them.

Here, the ash tree stands as both teacher and guardian of some of the world's oldest wisdom.

The ash tree has sheltered life here for millennia.

Today, this ancient relationship faces its greatest test.

One of the secrets Vermont foragers know is to look across the hillside for unopened trees.

We call these fingertips reaching out from the broadleaf forest in spring.

This is how you find new morel hunting grounds.

These finicky mushrooms only come out once the soil hits about 50 degrees, and their underground fungal network feeds the ash tree, which allows them to leaf out later in spring.

♪♪ Well, here is a perfect example of the Morchella esculenta or the yellow morel.

This is growing off this ash tree right here.

And this shows us that this forest is alive with mushrooms right now.

So it's really important to remember that we cut at the base to take these out of the woods, but we're leaving the entire root structure or mycelial structure in the woods so that it can repropagate next year.

And in fact, taking these out of the woods and using a foragers basket, we can actually spread the spores throughout the woods while we're walking and hunting more mushrooms.

So it's actually okay to take as many fruiting bodies as you want out of the woods.

♪♪ This tree is sacred to not only the indigenous people of Vermont, the Abenaki, who believe that they're descended from this tree, but also to my own family's heritage, which is Celtic Irish.

Dating all the way back to the Vikings, this tree was called Yggdrasil, the tree of Life.

It would connect the nine realms together.

Now, what's happening is it's under attack from a shoestring fungus, which you can see here has snapped this really healthy young tree right down the middle.

What it's also under threat from is the Emerald ash borer, which is coming in and moving north because of climate change.

The way that we manage forests right now, it's believed that we should be cutting this tree down.

If we keep cutting this tree down, we give it even less chance to adapt to the pressures that it's under.

The rest of these trees here, they may know something that we don't know.

They may know how to fight the shoestring fungus.

They may know how to fight the Emerald ash borer if we just leave them alone, if we just let them do their jobs.

So we need to give this tree a chance and not start cutting it down because we've already lost the American chestnut.

We've already lost the butternut.

It will figure out a way.

But if we continue to cut it down, it has no chance.

So hopefully we can find a way to save the sacred tree for generations to come and continue to harvest beautiful food from it.

With baskets full of the forest gifts, it's time to honor these wild foods in the most ancient way we know.

The cooking fire connects us to countless generations who gathered these same plants from these same woods.

Every meal becomes a bridge between the wild world and our own deep hunger for connection.

So we've come back to camp here with our haul from the woods, and we've gotten really lucky today.

We've got our ramps, we've got some pheasant back mushrooms, morels, Fiddleheads.

I've even dug up a little bit of burdock root and some garlic mustard.

And what we're going to do is we're going to make a quiche with potatoes and burdock root.

♪♪ One way to tell if you have burdock root is by the leaf.

Here we've got our burdock leaf, and that's a really broad leaf.

But this is the best way to be able to tell whether it's burdock is by the white backing of it.

So I'm going to use some younger shoots here.

And that's just going to add a little bit more sweetness to the potato mix.

And now just because everybody loves garlic, we're actually going to grab a couple of these ramp bulbs, throw those in there, get that on the fire and get that nice and hot.

It's going to take a little bit of time for those to get hot enough for us to mash them into the bottom of the pan.

It's really important to remember not to eat raw mushrooms.

A lot of wild mushrooms have something in them called hydrazine.

They're not going to hurt you, especially if you know what they are.

But it's really important always to just cook that out of them.

So I always give them a blanch before I start using them.

But we'll go ahead and use this one because we know it's safe.

Throw that in.

♪♪ And go ahead and cook that down too.

Got a nice mixture.

I'm just going to cheat a little bit.

And I'm going to throw in some butter here.

Add a little bit of that flavor.

We've just got some nice farmhouse butter.

There we go.

Oh, those are looking good, man.

We'll go ahead and crack some farm-fresh eggs from my family's farm over in South Royalton.

And now we'll go ahead and give this a nice beating.

Alright.

I'm hoping these are ready.

Let me just take a look.

♪♪ It looks pretty much like a quiche crust.

Okay.

♪♪ This is one of my favorite rituals every spring -- waiting for the first dish made from spring-fresh foraged ingredients to fully cook.

And that looks fantastic.

Morels, the pheasant back, the ramps, and the Fiddleheads all mixed together with the burdock and the potato crust.

Perfect example of spring foraging in Vermont.

Enjoy.

♪♪ ♪♪ While individual foragers like me harvest carefully from the forest floor, others fight for the forest itself.

These public lands face pressure from logging, development, and a change in climate.

The question becomes, how do we protect the very ecosystems that sustain both wild foods and our future?

For Zack Porter, who watchdogs these forests as executive director of the group Standing Trees, he sees these public lands as our best hope for a more resilient future.

-We're here in the middle of the spectacular Green Mountain National Forest.

It's our only national forest here in Vermont, one of two in New England.

And we're sitting next to this beautiful, cold, clear stream pouring out of the Breadloaf Wilderness area from the crest of the Green Mountains.

This water is invaluable for brook trout and other imperiled species here in New England.

It's the water we depend on in our communities downstream, and these forests protect our downstream communities from floods and from droughts, which are increasingly going to be things that we're dealing with with climate change.

The prospect of 11,000 acres of logging, which is what the Forest Service is proposing just over the hill here, it's a scary, scary prospect for me and for other Vermonters and New Englanders.

-Can you talk a little bit about how the forest actually makes us more resilient against these catastrophic flood events?

-I think we have a tendency to look out the window, especially in this part of the world.

And when we see green, we just assume it's a healthy forest.

But even though all forests are important, not all forests are the same.

And when it comes to the ecosystem services that we rely on and that we need even more desperately in the face of climate change, the flood risk reduction, the clean water production, the storage of water through drought periods, all of those things are enhanced the older a forest gets.

-You think about it 170 years ago.

This land was over 80% deforested, right?

And Vermont is now over 80% forested, which that's something to build on, right?

But if we're not doing it right, if we're not doing it properly with long-term goals in mind, then we're really doing ourselves a disservice and nature a disservice.

-Although the greenery has come back since deforestation here a century and a half ago, the quality of our forests has not yet returned.

We're still in the infancy of that recovery.

And instead of allowing our forests to grow old and to regain all those characteristics that are going to benefit us in the face of climate change, we're kind of doing the worst possible thing right now, which is to go around on a rotation and keep cutting down these maturing forests.

That is built into the way that we manage our public lands, by and large.

Just 3.3% of New England, about the same percentage of Vermont, is protected from timber harvest.

The tiniest amount.

We're not going to get through climate change.

We're not going to recover our biodiversity if that's all that we protect.

So it's up to us to make some big, bold decisions about how we want to do things going forward.

And we should know by now that we can't keep doing things the same way and expect a different outcome.

-And I think it's one of the things that humans are so prone to, right, thinking in these 80-year cycles, right?

-Yeah.

-But nature doesn't work in 80-year cycles.

It's like 80,000-year cycles, right?

-Yes.

And, you know, we've been essentially managing a forest here on an 80-year harvest rotation for generations.

What we really need right now is a new vision for the New England landscape, for the eastern U.S., for the nation broadly on our public lands in particular, where short-term economic gains should be the last thing on our mind when we're looking at how to take care of a place like this.

-We don't even know really, in the northeast what an old growth forest really looks like.

-Today it's estimated that we have less than one tenth of 1% of our landscape in an old-growth condition.

If we're going to overcome this climate crisis, the extinction crisis, we've got to do things differently.

The science tells us that we could double the amount of carbon in these forests right here by 2100, if we just let them grow older.

These forests will pack on the carbon for centuries.

There isn't a choice to be made here between having enough wood products and having enough quality habitat.

All the ecosystem services that we rely on, we can have both.

-Zack's passion for forest conservation connects to something even deeper -- a growing understanding of forests as living, intelligent communities.

Recent science reveals that trees and plants possess forms of awareness that challenge everything we thought we knew about consciousness.

What if the forest has been listening all along?

To truly understand our relationship with these forests, we need to see plants not as passive resources, but as the sophisticated, intelligent beings they truly are.

Environmental journalist Zoe Schlanger has spent years exploring the hidden world of plant intelligence for her groundbreaking book, "The Light Eaters."

What inspired you to write this amazing book?

-I started reading botany journals on lunch breaks and noticed that in the pages of these botany journals, scientists were debating a radical thing, which was whether or not plants could be considered in some way intelligent or conscious.

And as a reporter, I thought, that's an amazing story.

At the same time, the first fern genome was sequenced, and this was a huge deal because fern genomes are enormous.

They're so incredibly ancient.

And I was looking at the picture of the first fern genome to be sequenced, and it was the fern Azolla filiculoides, which is this tiny little green fern with little scalloped edges.

And it's the size of your thumbnail.

And I fell in love with this fern.

I thought it was absolutely stunning.

I ended up getting a tattoo of it on my arm and fell in love with fern science.

And I started talking to botanists and realized botanists have this natural love of plants, and they see plants for what they are, these dynamic, active organisms, so radically unlike us that have developed alien ways to make a good life in their world.

-Plant intelligence is on display through the mycelium, because every single plant grown in the wild has fungal hyphae laced into its roots.

-Often these are deep evolutionary relationships of certain fungi and certain plants.

So really, where does a fungi start or stop and the plant starts?

I mean, the earliest plants didn't have roots.

They didn't have vasculature systems, they didn't have branches.

They were just green things.

There's one idea that plants grew roots to house their fungal collaborators, that this is a deeply enmeshed relationship that is the basis for the physical form that plants even take.

Fungi are even almost harder to conceive of than plants because we accept plants as a kingdom of life.

But it's harder to understand fungi as their own kingdom of life.

But they are.

They're not plants or animals.

-Yeah.

-So there's this debate raging about whether or not we can call plants intelligent, whether or not we can call their vasculature, their vein system analogous to a nervous system, whether or not we can make these connections.

An ethnobotanist named Timothy Plowman, who was super sick of this debate over syntax, what words to use, said "They can eat light.

Isn't that enough?"

If they didn't photosynthesize, we would have never evolved.

They made the habitable world.

-You mean we wouldn't be here unless it was for plants?

-Absolutely not.

And we wouldn't persist for very long if they suddenly disappeared.

I mean, your brain is an organ that runs chiefly on glucose, a plant sugar.

So us talking and thinking about plants right now is thanks to plants.

Every thought that's ever passed through your brain is the product of plants.

The reality of it is that we are all products of evolutionary creativity.

And evolution is not hierarchical.

Evolution is not linear.

We are each these nodes in this entangled web of life that is continuously being born.

We are not more evolved than anything else.

We are all just evolving and everything has a right to be here.

-This new understanding of plant intelligence brings us full circle to ancient wisdom.

Indigenous peoples have always known what science is just now discovering, that we are part of a living, breathing, thinking world.

As the day draws towards evening, Zoe and I head back into the forest en route to join a celebration as old as spring itself.

-What is this called?

Horsetail.

It's one of the most ancient plants ever.

This is -- In the time of the dinosaurs, this was the size of trees.

-Stop it.

We're headed to the Beltane gathering at the Marble House in Dorset, Vermont.

It brings together all the threads of our story -- the reverence for plants, the cycles of the seasons, and our place in the great web of life.

-Oh, it's so beautiful.

Look at this.

Gorgeous.

Wow.

-The same forces that bring the Fiddleheads up through the soil, that call the ramps from their winter sleep, that power the intelligence of every plant in the forest, these forces flow through us as well and through the food we create using the bounty spring brings in the Vermont forest.

This is the promise of spring -- that life finds a way, that intelligence emerges from the most unexpected places, that even in the face of great challenges, the dance continues.

The forest endures.

The cycle begins again.

And so we dance with the seasons, grateful to be part of this ancient, ever renewing story of life on Earth.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from the Vermont International Film Foundation, bringing the world to Vermont through film and supporting filmmakers in Vermont and beyond for 40 years.

And with support from... ♪♪ ♪♪