Chloe, professional forager and founder
of Gourmet Gatherings.
Foraging is my full-time profession, and my greatest passion; when I am not foraging for work, you will find me foraging for fun, with my beautiful spaniel sidekick at my side, Samphire, an incredible mushroom-hunter!
I am passionate about all aspects of wild food; how it is sought and found, sustainably harvested, processed and ultimately enjoyed in delicious food and drink recipes! If I'm not out foraging, I'm to be found nurturing my garden, or in the kitchen.
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Since childhood, I have been entranced and intrigued by the natural world, exploring and foraging with my Father and Grandfather since a toddler. I have also always been greedy, my first word was “more” and my earliest memories either involve food, plants, creatures or all 3! I feel tremendously fortunate to have been able to develop my lifetime passion for nature & food into a career, I am a forager, educator, purveyor, consultant and chef of wild food.
I forage daily, meaning I go out and search for all varieties of wild edibles, in the stunning counties of Monmouthshire, Herefordshire & Gloucestershire, the Forest of Dean, and around South Wales & Bristol, where I am based, and beyond.
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I love to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for the incredible bounty of flavourful and nutritious wild edibles on our doorstep with you, whether it be in the capacity of a foraging teacher on a guided excursion, or as a wild food chef catering your specil event, or as a consultant or collaborator.
Book a foraging course online, or reach out to me by email for anything else!
I look forward to sharing my edible wild world with you!
Chloe
This part of the world is incredibly bountiful with diverse wild produce.
We have a seaweed that tastes exactly like truffles with a hint of garlic, named Pepper Dulse! Woodruff, a beautiful woodland plant growing in whorls, which once dried, tastes like Amaretto and vanilla! Wild spinach, samphire, plantains and cabbages line the estuary coast along with intensely flavoured salt marsh herbs, whilst rock samphire hangs from the cliffs. Mushrooms ooze out of the forests from tree trunks and amongst the leaf litter and in ancient meadows, in the most glorious colours and formations. Chanterelle, morel, oyster, porcini, chicken of the woods, and a myriad of other delicious mushrooms are all abundant in woodland, whilst the meadows are bursting with their rainbow-coloured cousins. It is hard to take more than a few steps without coming across an edible, in any given habitat, if you know what to look for! At any given time of the year, Mother Nature's larder is bountiful, as one species fades out, the next arrives, even in the depths of Winter, I can fill my baskets to overflowing, you just have to know where, when and how to find wild deliciousness! That is what I specialise in and what I thrive on doing.
In my local area, we can boast woodland, coastal, meadow, hedgerow, mountain, river and estuarine habitats, which all host an incredible array of biodiversity and biomass of edible flora and fauna.
I have been foraging all of my life. I was educated in England, however my family lived between London and mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands, so I was forever dipping in rock pools, fishing around with a net scavenging rocky shores for shrimp and octopus, or at sea with my Father. He taught me to shoot in the pine forest on the mountain where we lived and nurtured my hunting and fishing instincts from mushrooming, to fly, deep-sea and reef fishing. We travelled extensively worldwide as a family, exploring the wildlife everywhere we went. Safaris and tribal visits inspired me to undertake a degree in African Studies and Swahili, then my love of the sea took me back to do a degree in Aquatic Zoology, during the course of which, I moved to the Caribbean for my research. Upon graduating I remained in the Caribbean and pursued research towards a PhD in Chemical Ecology. I lived in Jamaica, Honduras & Bermuda for 15 years. In Jamaica I worked for the largest marne reserve in the Caribbean and conducted research for my Bachelors degree. In Honduras I contined research for my graduate degree, and in Bermuda I continued that research whilst running international marine education programs at university level. After 6 years in Bermuda, I decided to pause my marine interests and pursue my other loves, all things food and drink related! I moved back to Honduras and opened a cocktail, wine and tapas bar, on stilts over the water, in a beautiful bay. All those years in the Caribbean I continued my foraging, catching crabs and octopus by snorkel, and building fish-pots by hand from jungle sticks and setting them on the reef, then hauling them up to be surprised by what creatures were inside. I was spearfishing lobster and snapper diving on the reefs, learning about medicinal plants and fruits in the jungle from the elderly locals and I was either deep-sea fishing, marlin trawling, hand-lining, drift or net fishing as often as the weather allowed. After 15 years in the Caribbean, I returned to the UK due to my Father becoming unwell. I moved to South Wales and now live in a small picturesque village in the Wye Valley, steeped in history, surrounded by some of the best foraging territory to be found in the UK!
