Field & ForestJul – Aug

Wild Berry Picking

The cloudberry, worth planning around

The cloudberry is the one worth planning around. It grows in open bog, one berry to a plant, ripens amber for a short window in July, and is the only wild food in Sweden that people are genuinely secretive about. Good ground is family knowledge and is not shared.

Picking it means walking on sphagnum, which is wet and uneven and slower than it looks, in the weeks when the mosquitoes are at their worst. That is the honest description, and people do it every year anyway.

Blueberry and lingonberry are the easy abundance underneath everything — blueberry from late July, lingonberry into September, both in quantities that make the right of public access feel like a genuinely radical piece of law.

What the right to pick covers

The right to pick is real and it is broad: wild berries, mushrooms and flowers on almost any land, without asking. It does not extend to a garden, a crop or a plantation, and in the far north it sits alongside Sámi grazing rights on the same ground.

Take repellent, a head net if you are going onto bog, and long sleeves in the warmest weather.

July and August. Cloudberry first and briefly, blueberry through, lingonberry last and hardiest — and whatever you pick, somebody will cook it that evening rather than let you carry it home.

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