Control lies at the center of the relationship. Gardening is all about control, while gathering requires you to relinquish it.

In a garden, you control the soil, the water, what grows where when and next to what. You become an imperfect master of your own little green world, a guardian standing vigil over your charges. You squash caterpillars, crush beetles, spray mites. You cover your tomatoes for fear of frost, and shade your peppers if the sun shines too strong.

In the wider world, however, it is the plants that have control over you. They decide whether to fruit or not, drop acorns or not, present themselves to you or not. Anyone who has ever hunted mushrooms knows they possess a paranormal power to become visible, or invisible, depending on your state of mind. You cannot will a morel to show itself; you have to let them come to you in their own time.

Gardeners plan. They pore over seed catalogs and scribble down imaginary garden plots when the snows are flying in February, and then when it comes time to plant, they line their seeds up like soldiers: straight lines, right angles.

Hank Shaw

Gatherers meander. Sure, when we wander into the wild, or at least the semi-wild, we have some notion of what we ought to find when we get there; only a fool looks for blackberries in April. But a forager must keep an open mind—and open eyes —for the unexpected. The salal berries I found last month while huckleberry-picking were just the most recent example.

It's like shopping for your dinner: If you walk into the supermarket in search of a ribeye or some pork shoulder, you are all but assured to find it. But if you are in search of fresh fish, you really cannot plan. Maybe the salmon is sketchy today, but the sole sings to you. Or something special might make an unexpected appearance, like fresh sardines or spot prawns. Then you must drop everything and seize the moment. Fish, incidentally, are the last wild food we humans regularly eat.

Hank Shaw

But it goes deeper than the question of control. The more I forage for wild plants, the more I start to look askance at my garden plants. Don't get me wrong, I love my funky Italian lettuces, my Portuguese cabbages, my German radishes. It's just that, well, they're needy. Some, particularly the brassica family, are downright pushy. If you garden, you grow brassicas: cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, radishes, mustard greens, etc. And at least in my garden, the brassica clan grows under siege. Cabbage looper caterpillars, the larvae of those pretty little white butterflies, gnaw the leaves ceaselessly. Worse, a legion of black-and-orange harlequin bugs can materialize overnight to suck my broccoli raab dry. I must tend my plants almost daily to prevent the bugs from gaining the upper hand.

Contrast that with my tepary beans, which are more laid-back. Teparies originated in the Sonoran Desert, and as you might imagine, they require almost no water. A few waterings to get the plants started, and you can literally walk away all summer. Yes, the beans are small, but this is a fair trade for an effort-free crop in my book.

Hank Shaw

It was as I was planting these tepary beans last May that I fully realized something: Half the plants in my plots are volunteers. My garden is six years old, so there is a lot of seed around. Every spring, and sometimes in fall, I get volunteer peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, arugula, and the like. Every year I've let more of the seedlings live, weeding around the strongest. This summer, all my tomatoes, tomatillos, melons, and squash were volunteers. I have a fennel patch that consistently gives me a half dozen bulbs each year. I am, in effect, relinquishing some control.