Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, by Gabrielle Cerberville, 2025, sets the scene in an unexpected way for a book on foraging. The author is just divorced, grieving the loss of two beloved cats, and living in a nearly condemned van whose pipes have just frozen. She staggers out into what she calls the Stillness—the time of year when “nature’s silence is punctuated only by the howling voice of the wind,” but at certain times there is a “magic only appreciable during the soft moments when it is briefly recognized, the moments that hang, like a flake on an ungloved hand.”
This contrast between hardship and gift sets the stage for a moving meditation on our relationship with the natural world. That a glossary of plant parts precedes this introduction, rather than taking its customary place at the end of the book, indicates how botanically serious it is as well.
Gathered is structured around varieties of plants and the seasons, and each chapter includes instructions for gathering, methods of preserving, and recipes. Cerberville provides lists of supplies and implements to bring on foraging expeditions as well as guidance for respecting the environment: always leave something behind. Even the recipes illumine: in the directions for making Juniper ash polenta cake, we learn that Juniper is traditionally burnt for cooking in order to release nutrients.
Cerberville’s love of plants comes through even in her botanical descriptions. Morels, she writes, have both saprobic and mycorrhizal habits, consuming the nutrient-rich material of decaying logs but also “knitting hyphal threads … through a favorable area full of living trees.” Her attention to the natural world is acute. She plants a terraphone recorder in the earth and can hear “spent pine needles hit the forest floor, like pins dropping.” Picking a Lactarius indigo mushroom she watches “blue latex practically gush out over my hands.” She invokes the excitement of the hunt and of the find: “Once you find your first plant, your first mushroom, you’ll be chasing that high for the rest of your life.”
Cerberville populates Gathered with a rich cast of characters. She follows Manuel, a 60-year-old silah (elder) of the Guna people in Panama, through the jungle, as he sings to the plants he is harvesting. She takes her Aunt Millie, who is nearly blind, for walks and offers a guided sensescape of the world as they move through it by handing her flowers to smell, soft mullein leaves to feel.
But the most important people in the book aren’t people—or, rather, they are. Humans, Cerberville notes, share 30-50% of their DNA with the fungal kingdom. And as fellow beings and part of the same web of life, they are people of their own kind. “A mushroom is a mushroom person; a human is a human person,” she writes. “All of us have meaning, purpose, wisdom.” Immersing herself in this community provides a deep consolation for the ache of loneliness and loss. “I used to feel alone, even when I was surrounded by people. Now I feel like I belong to others, even when I am entirely alone.” Year after year she finds herself “sitting with the children” of the plants she visited with the previous year. Foraging, she observes, “puts me right in more ways than one.” It is in the woods, eyes to the forest floor, that it becomes easy for her “to identify who I really am and how I really feel.”
Gathered spans foraging manual, memoir, botanical guide, recipe book, and healing journey, but most of all it chronicles our community with the world. “All sorts of people belong here, in the system we share together,” Cerberville writes. “Plant people, mushroom people, tree people, animal people, perhaps even human people, when we manage to communicate with one another.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
