Spring has truly arrived (this week the weather has been turning on a penny from snow showers to bright blue skies) and we're in the middle of the first foraging glut of the year. This month I've seen loads of wild garlic, primroses, stinging nettles, dead nettles, Alexanders, Jack-by-the-hedge (a.k.a. garlic mustard) and, you guessed it, sorrel!

Obligatory note of caution #1: Be careful not to mix up other leaves in your bag or basket as sorrel does sometimes grow mixed in with other plants. Don't confuse sorrel leaves with the leaves of Lords and Ladies or lilies that may grow alongside them - they're toxic. Finally, as with any plant you pick from ground level, especially in a popular dog-walking spot like Lake Field, give your sorrel a thorough wash before you eat it!

The taste is the final identifier. Sorrel has a tangy, almost lemony flavour. I love the way it makes my mouth water when I chew on a leaf. The citrusy element makes fresh sorrel a great flavour addition to wraps and sandwiches (with hommous, or egg, or roast vegetables). When it's cooked, it reduces and turns limp and brownish. I also find that the tanginess becomes slightly more subdued. Add sorrel at the end of the cooking process to retain more of the flavour.

As with most of my recipes, the quantities listed are approximate. It might be that you need more liquid - so use more liquid. If you like a cheesier risotto, use more cheese. If you like more garlic, put more in. If you want to eat more veggies, add them. If you're vegan, use a vegan cheese or add a few tablespoons of nutritional yeast flakes and/or a ground up dried shitake mushroom for umami. However. While the ingredient quantities are flexible, you do need to pay attention to the timing: have everything ready before you start and be prepared to stir the pot almost constantly for the entire process. Here's a good risotto primer. And here's one of those Guardian "How to make the perfect..." experiment articles on risotto.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 onion, chopped as finely as you can be bothered (not very fine, if you're me)
• 2 nice big knobs of butter (or vegan margarine)
• 250g arborio or carnaroli rice
• Half a glass of dry white wine (have some more on hand for the cook!)
• 1 litre vegetable stock (1 litre water, 1 or 2 stock cubes), hot
• 1 cup frozen peas
• A few stems of asparagus (trimmed, cut into 1 inch lengths)
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• A big bunch of sorrel, washed and roughly chopped
• A handful of other wild spring herbs (e.g. wild garlic, Jack-by-the-hedge), washed and finely chopped
• A handful of parsley, washed and finely chopped
• 100g cheese (soft goats cheese, or a mix of gruyere and cream cheese, or parmesan, or anything you like)
• Juice of half a lemon, zest of the whole lemon
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Salt

Method

1. Prepare all your ingredients in advance. Make sure the stock is warm, the lemon is zested and juiced, the cheese is grated.
2. Put a large saucepan on medium heat and add the oil. Fry the onion gently, stirring frequently, until it's translucent. Try not to let it brown. This usually takes a minimum of 5 minutes, even if you're impatient like me.
3. Melt one knob of butter (or vegan margarine) with the onion then add the rice. Turn up the heat and stir the rice until it's all coated in oil and begins to go translucent (a minute or so).
4. Pop the wine in with the rice (it will hiss!) and stir continuously until all the liquid has evaporated. Turn the heat back to medium-low.
5. Start adding the stock, one ladle at a time, stirring after each ladleful until the rice has absorbed the liquid. This will probably take around 15 minutes. The low temperature helps ensure that the rice doesn't overcook on the outside and become mushy while the inside is still crunchy and undercooked. (If you're making a vegan risotto, add your umami about half way through this process.)
6. When you've only got a bit of liquid left and the rice is almost done (just on the crunchy side of al dente), add the peas, asparagus, crushed garlic, lemon zest and the rest of the stock. I try to add these early enough so they have enough time to cook, but not so early that they'll be limp and brown.
7. Turn off the heat, stir in the spring herbs and parsley. Add cheese (if using) and second knob of butter/margarine. As it's melting, stir briskly to up the creaminess factor.
8. Just before you dish it up, mix in the sorrel (reserve a few small leaves for garnish), a squeeze of lemon juice and  pepper and salt to suit your taste The sorrel is added at the end of this recipe so it retains more of its tangy flavour and stays greenish.
9. Plate up, using remaining sorrel leaves for garnish. Eat that deliciously tangy risotto!

Top: View over the plains west of Bairnsdale. We took a few minutes out of our drive to detour down a wide gravel road off the highway, hop out of the car and admire the landscape. I've never explored this area, but this view made me want to go back and do so.

Middle left: "The Canoe Tree" at Howitt Park, Bairnsdale. Aboriginal people removed a 4m long section of bark to make a canoe, creating this scar.

Middle right: We stayed at my aunt and uncle's place on the Mornington Peninsula, meeting up with lots of folk from my dad's large family for my cousin's baby's naming day. This is my aunt and uncle's backyard, with my cousin's tent in the background.

Bottom: The old shearing and milking shed on the river flats at the bottom of my parents' place. There used to be more fences here, when they had sheep to shear, cows to milk and a vegetable patch to protect. There was no electricity - Dad did the milking and shearing the old fashioned way, by hand.

Top: Temperate rainforest. We went for a scramble along the creek bed that runs through my parents' place, down to the river. Closer to the river, deer (non-native animals) are making a bit of a mess of the valley.

Middle left: A pied currawong. Currawongs are handsome birds with large beaks and fierce, curious, bright yellow eyes. The name is onomatopoeic, it sounds a bit like their usual warbling call (they can also imitate some other birds).

Middle right: View across the Orbost river flats with the Princes Highway on the right and the old wooden railway bridge on the left. We visited a fantastic exhibition in Orbost, all about the history of the railway (the last trains came to Orbost in the late 1980s) and we signed a petition to have this bridge looked after. The line from Orbost to Bairnsdale is now a rail trail, which (obviously) does not use the dangerous bridges.

​Bottom: A tiny white jelly fungus spotted in the rainforest. There are thought to be over 250,000 species of fungi in Australia, though only 13,000 of them have been recorded. 

Driving through Melbourne and out to the Mornington Peninsula, I notice - for the first time in my life, really - the diversity of eucalypt trees. The freeway is lined with the short, scrubby kinds, multiple limbs springing up from the base, Mallee-style - trees that curl and wave and seem truly alien to eyes accustomed to oak, birch, spruce, hazel. I suddenly develop some sympathy for John Glover: I can understand, now, how he and others might have grappled with the unfamiliar proportions and anatomy of Australian trees, unintentionally emphasising the weird, writhing otherness of eucalypts in their paintings.

Down on the peninsula and through South Gippsland, I crane my neck to look up the elegant, smooth-skinned trunks of spotted gums, their pale, almost pastel pink skin covered in large splotches of smooth grey or creamy bark. Driving through the La Trobe Valley and into the plains around Sale and Bairnsdale, the dominant colours change to burnt orange and brown. We find river gums here, the broad, solid trunks covered in bark at the base, but sloughing it off in great, hanging ribbons at the top, where smooth boughs emerge a rich, tannin-y cream. The wavy Mallee branches have disappeared. After Lakes Entrance we pass through forests of stringybark, stringybark and stringybark, grey and rough coated, straight and slender, here blackened by the bushfires of a few years ago, with young, leafy branches springing from the burnt trunks.

At Orbost, we leave the highway to head out over the river flats, where blue-grey stands of coastal grey box dot the paddocks. Up the Snowy River, the rocky hills are striped with stringybark and ironbark while the lush valleys host tall mountain grey gums. On the way back to Melbourne a week later, we pass through the Dandenongs and acres of towering mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, one of the tallest trees in the world.

There are dozens of other species, too - eucalypts, acacias, banksias, others. The whole time, I ask my sister, the horticulturalist and gardener, “What’s that tree? What’s that tree?” She gives answers that satisfy me, but she also reminds me that there are hundreds of eucalypt species in Australia and only a specialist could keep up with my demands. When we reach my parents’ place, I ask them the same question, hoping that almost four decades in the area will have given them time to identify the local trees. They pull a few useful books off their crowded shelves - Forest Trees of Australia (1979 edition), Native Trees and Shrubs of South Eastern Australia (1984 edition) - editions new enough to have some full colour photos, though most are still black and white. I wonder what’s changed in the world of tree classification since their publication. I start Googling tree names, but Wikipedia has scant knowledge on some species and I’m not sure it’s any more accurate or up-to-date.

This sparse information makes me wonder if there's a big difference between my two countries. In the UK (at least, where I live), people go on bluebell walks and badger spotting evenings, they discuss what happened on Springwatch (or Autumnwatch, or Winterwatch), go on foraging and wild food cookery courses, happily spend an hour and a half watching a film about a year in the life of an oak tree, take part in outdoors campaigns (like #30DaysWild), get involved in citizen science (like the Big Garden Birdwatch) and read enough books about outdoorsy, naturey things that bookshops often have a “nature writing” section. There is a whole, loosely defined genre of media dedicated to nature. If I want to find out what bird I’ve just seen in the UK, there’s a pretty good chance the RSPB will have it on their online bird identifier. For butterflies there’s a Butterfly Conservation charity, for bats there's the Bat Conservation Trust, for bumblebees there's the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. There are countless pocket guides and wallcharts of wildflowers, birds, trees, insects, fungi and forage-able food. 

Compared to that, mainstream Australian culture seems to lack curiosity: there's very little desire to explore or connect with everyday nature. (This week, it feels like the petition to save a Lemon-scented gum on Flemington Road in Melbourne has not taken off as quickly as it would have done in the UK.) I wonder what that’s about. Is it fear? Do people worry about being called greenies? (Remember those car stickers, "Fertilise the bush, doze in a greenie" and "The only true wilderness is between a greenie's ears"? Remember how some shops in Orbost refused to serve anyone who looked like they were on the way to or from protest camps to save old growth forests?) Or is it anxiety about the bush itself, a relic of the colonists’ adversarial relationship with Australian landscapes, flora and fauna (lost in the hills, bitten by a snake, starving to death)? Is it a deeper cultural uneasiness, an unsteady repercussion of the new settlers' campaign to wipe out any intimate, long-term, traditional knowledge of Australian ecosystems along with the Aboriginal people who carried that knowledge? Is it simply that we’re taught that Australia is so big and there is so much bushland, so much desert, so much coast that we take it for granted? Are we just blasé?

Perhaps in the UK we can - and must - focus so intently because there is so little to focus on. Messing around on the Woodland Trust’s website a few days after returning to England, I read that there are two species of oak native to the UK, three species of native conifer and several species of native willow (which can hybridise, making identification tricky). The list of UK native trees, including photos, fits on a webpage that I can scroll through in a few seconds. I flick back through my photos from Australia, looking at all the trees I couldn’t identify there. Sure, most of them are eucalypts or acacias, but with several hundred species of the former and almost a thousand of the latter, the task of identifying them seems impossible. After looking at those tree books at my parents’ house I know even less about Australian flora than I did before.

Still, a eucalypt is a eucalypt is a Eucalyptus (or a Corymbia, or an Angophora, or...). The leaves always give off that shock-sharp scent when you crush them between your fingers or add one to a billy of tea. On our first full day at my parents’ place, the summer fire restrictions end. Dad and my sister light a big bonfire, hosing down the nearby tree trunks to keep it under control, raking dry branches into the flames. Up at the house, Mum starts to boil the kettle for tea, but I suggest we take a billy down to the fire instead. We dig around in the cupboards for a suitably billy-ish vessel, spoon tea leaves into a jar, grab some milk and some cups and head out for an afternoon adventure. The billy takes time to heat up, wedged among the coals, collecting a bit of ash and developing a fine, smoky flavour. The tea leaves go in when the water starts bubbling and, without being polite enough to check with the others, I throw a gum leaf in as well. The thing about billy tea is it has to be a bit dirty, a bit over-brewed, a bit tanniny, or it’s just not right. This tea? Is amazing.

We sit around on old planks and stumps of wood, staring at the fire as it dies down, chatting about this and that. I show Dad how to make a drink can stove, probably the first time I’ve ever been able to teach him anything remotely Boy Scout-ish. My sister disappears up to the house with Mum and they return carrying foil-wrapped potatoes, a pot full of rode kool (red cabbage, a nod to our Dutch heritage) and - best of all - piles of buttered bread, slices of cheese, tins of baked beans and a jaffle iron. The potatoes go in the ashes to cook slowly, the rode kool nestles at the edge of the fire. The five of us construct jaffles and jam the iron under the red hot coals, leaving it in a bit longer, and a bit longer still, to get that extra crunch on the bread. I bite into mine when I know full well it will be too hot, burning my fingers and tongue with impatience. After stuffing ourselves with food, we make another billy of tea, this time with Earl Grey teabags and two box leaves, which is perhaps not the best combination. By the time we finish our cups, it’s dark. We head home, full, tired, happy and infused with the smell of eucalyptus smoke. As Dad winds the hose back up to the garage, the rain begins.

Top: Dawn, looking east from the garden down the paddock and over the trees to the lightening sky.

Middle left: Under the bridge. When I was a kid, our drive crossed two bridges on its way to our house. The bridges were wood, planks of timber laid across two huge tree trunks. They rumbled and juddered under the car as you drove across, they were very slippery after rain and the gaps between the planks made walking a bit hazardous, too. They were picturesque, but slightly terrifying (especially the longer, higher one, which we imaginatively called "The Big Bridge"). Eventually, my parents had the bridges replaced with these culverts. They are big enough to walk through, as we did on our adventure down the creek to the river.

Middle right: Billy tea, brewed and stewed, stirred with a stick, flavoured with a gum leaf.

Bottom: I set off to explore the mysterious Other Side Of The River (for about two minutes). Although I lived here for the first eighteen years of my life, I don't remember ever bothering to swim or wade all the way over the Snowy - only ever to the sandbank in the middle. UK summers have hardened me up enough that an overcast autumn day in East Gippsland is plenty warm enough for a swim! The next day I even convinced Mum to come along with me.

Top: A superb fairy wren. Yes, that really is their name, though we tend to call them little blue wrens. This is a female, with a cute bandit mask around her eyes. Mature males have bright blue and black heads and blue tails. They are jittery little things, flitting restlessly through the garden in search of food, bouncing comically across the grass. As I always do with cute small birds, I stuck my finger out and demanded they come and sit on it. As always, they didn't.

Middle left: We saw many of the wild animals I'm used to finding around my parents' house - a lyrebird, wallabies, and this wombat. Unfortunately, the little beastie has mange - a horrible condition.

Middle right: Swans on the Yeerung River, near Cape Conran. I have missed seeing black swans, with their ruffled wings, hidden patches of white feathers and bright red bills. They have quite a nice call, too. Also at the Yeerung, a sea eagle flew low overhead. That was very special.

Bottom: The Yeerung spends a lot of time cut off from the ocean by the sand. This means the sun has time to heat the water up, making it a lovely place to swim. When we visited, a shallow strip was open between the river and the sea. You can see where the tanniny, iron-rich water of the Yeerung meets the clear, blue-green water of Bass Strait. This is also a popular place for kayaking - we arrived just as a group was departing to paddle back up to the put-in place.