The June Riverbank: What’s Growing, What to Pick, and the One to Never Touch

Yesterday I walked a stretch of riverbank I have known for years and paid attention to it properly for the first time in weeks. Not looking for anything in particular. Just walking slowly along the water and noticing what was there.

Mid-June is a particular moment on the English riverbank. The spring flush is over — the wild garlic long gone, the hawthorn blossom done, the elderflower on its way out. What replaces it is something more settled, more fully itself. The vegetation is at full height. The light is different. The whole ecosystem feels as though it has reached a kind of temporary equilibrium before the slow turn towards autumn begins.

This is what I found.

Meadowsweet, everywhere

The first thing you notice is the scent. Then the height — those great frothy panicles of cream-white flowers reaching up to five feet in some stretches, dense enough to brush your arms as you walk. Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) is at its absolute peak on this riverbank right now, and it dominates the damp margins completely.

I wrote about the science of meadowsweet’s scent and its documented nervous system effects earlier this week — the linalool, the methyl salicylate, the four peer-reviewed studies on its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity. Standing in a thick stand of it in the morning quiet, all of that feels less like science and more like just being in the right place. Both things can be true.

Dog rose in the hedgerow

Higher up the bank, where it gets drier and the hedgerow takes over from the riverside vegetation, the dog roses are at their best. Rosa canina — five broad pale-pink petals, golden stamens, that faint, clean, unmistakeable scent. They are brief. Two or three weeks at most, and by late June the petals will be gone and the hips beginning to swell.

I pick the petals when I find them like this — early in the morning before the bees have been through, when they are still fully open and the scent is strongest. They are beautiful in a cold infusion (like the meadowsweet method: cold water overnight in the fridge), in a simple syrup, or scattered over a salad. The flavour is delicate enough that anything with heat tends to diminish it. The hips in September will be a different story — one to plan for. Full details on the June foraging picture in the June foraging guide.

Comfrey at the margin

Lower down the bank, where the ground is wet enough to squelch underfoot, there is a long run of comfrey. Symphytum officinale — big, rough, slightly alarming in scale, with those characteristic drooping clusters of purple-pink bell flowers. The leaves are enormous, hairy, and immediately distinctive once you know them.

Comfrey has a complicated relationship with modern foraging guidance. It was historically used internally — as a tea, a tincture, a wound herb — but current evidence on its pyrrolizidine alkaloid content makes internal use inadvisable. Externally, it remains one of the better-evidenced traditional wound and bruise herbs: allantoin, its primary active compound, has genuine documented activity in promoting cell proliferation and reducing inflammation at the surface. The leaves make an excellent garden mulch. The plant is worth knowing, and worth pointing out to children precisely because the “big, rough, impressive looking” plants are not always the dangerous ones.

Hemlock water dropwort: the one to know and avoid

And then the one that matters most to identify — not to eat, but to recognise, to point out, and to be entirely clear about.

Hemlock water dropwort (Oenanthe crocata) is growing in three or four dense patches along this stretch of bank, right in among the meadowsweet and comfrey. It is one of the most poisonous plants in Britain. The toxin — oenanthotoxin, a polyunsaturated alcohol — causes convulsions and death with no antidote. Cases of fatal poisoning in Britain are recorded every few years, almost always involving people who have mistaken it for something edible.

I am writing about it here not to alarm but because knowing it is one of the most important things a forager in a wet habitat can do. The photographs below are from Wikimedia Commons and are here specifically so that you can study them carefully, at home, before you go out.

What it looks like: tall (up to 150cm), with hollow, ridged stems and compound leaves made up of wedge-shaped or triangular leaflets. The white umbel flowers look superficially similar to cow parsley, elder, sweet cicely, and other Apiaceae members. It grows specifically in wet ground — riverbanks, ditches, marshes, the edges of ponds. If you see a large white-umbelled plant growing in or very near water, treat it as hemlock water dropwort until proven otherwise.

What makes it different from edible umbellifers: the stems are hollow and distinctly ridged; the leaflets are more angular and wedge-shaped than the feathery leaflets of cow parsley or sweet cicely; the smell is unpleasant — a sour, acrid parsley-like scent rather than the pleasant aniseed of sweet cicely or the clean green of cow parsley. The roots, if disturbed, are pale, clustered, and smell strongly unpleasant — this is critical, because the roots are where the highest concentration of oenanthotoxin is found and are the part most likely to be mistaken for edible roots.

The rule: if you are in a wet habitat and you see a large white-umbelled plant you are not 100% certain of, do not touch it, do not uproot it, and do not taste it. Walk past it. Come back with a reliable field guide. Go out with someone who knows it. The riverbank in June is full of good things — but this particular plant is a reason to go slowly, look carefully, and be sure before you touch anything you are not already certain of.

What else is there

Beyond the four plants I have described in detail, this stretch of bank has burdock rosettes (first-year, not yet sending up flowering stems — the best time to note the location for autumn root harvesting), patches of great willowherb coming into flower, clumps of water mint with that sharp cool scent when you brush against it, and stands of common reed at the water’s edge that go on for hundreds of metres.

There is also fat hen in the disturbed ground where someone has cleared the bank at some point — exactly as we covered in Wednesday’s post, growing on the bare earth left by clearance, thriving in the nitrogen-rich soil of a managed riverbank.

The thing I keep coming back to, walking stretches like this, is how layered it is. In any 50-metre section of a managed English riverbank in June there are probably 40 or 50 plant species. Some edible, some medicinal, some toxic, most neither. The forager’s skill is less about knowing a list of things to eat and more about developing the kind of slow, attentive looking that lets you read a landscape rather than just scan it.

That takes time. It takes going back to the same places in different seasons. It takes being wrong occasionally and correcting. It takes the kind of patience that the riverbank, with its long unhurried life, has in abundance and that most of us are still learning.

Find a stretch of water. Walk it slowly. See what’s there.

A note on safety

This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Hemlock water dropwort (Oenanthe crocata) is one of the most poisonous plants in Britain — do not touch, uproot, or consume any part of it. Many white-umbelled plants are toxic: never consume any plant from the carrot family (Apiaceae) unless you are entirely certain of your identification. Wild plants can be dangerous if misidentified. Always consult a reliable field guide and, where possible, go out with an experienced forager before eating anything new. Always consult your GP before using wild plants medicinally, particularly if pregnant, breastfeeding, or taking medication.