 Hello, I'm Christophe Derody from Paris and for over the past 10 years, I've been facilitating white plants' works and workshops to share my love for nature and spread knowledge about edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms. I founded Le Chemin de la Nature, or in English, the Path of Nature, in order to provide online training in botany, foraging, white plant cooking and herbalism. Even the most common plants around us are no longer familiar to us. Many of the plants that people call weeds and are desperately trying to get rid of actually are very useful. Our environment has a lot to offer and I would love to share a little glimpse of it with you in this video. We are in the Bois-de-Vincennes, one of the largest parks in Paris, right in my backyard, where there are many things to discover and eat. I'm going to show you a few edible white plants that you can find in all of Europe and most of North America. There is no need to go very far to find some plantain. Here we have the narrowleaf plantain, Plantago Lancerata, which can be easily recognized by its narrow shade leaves and palpable parallel veins. You can harvest the young leaves all year round. They have a subtle mushroom taste that's quite lovely. Even the flower stalk appears, don't miss the flower buds, they are delicious. In addition to being edible, it's also medicinal and contains anti-allergy and anti-inflammatory substances. That's why you can use it as a poultice for insect bites and why it's also traditionally used internally to help relieve bronchitis and allergies. Plantains are also a bio indicator of a nutrient balance soil, where there are many of them, it might give you a hint about where best to start a vegetable garden. Do you recognize this one? It's Dandelion, perhaps the most iconic weed even though it's completely edible from its roots to its flowers. The name Dandelion is an adaptation of Dandelion in French, which literally means lion tooth, because of the shape of the edge of the leaves. Its leaves can be eaten raw in salad or cooked and so can its stem and flowers. When the flowers are still flower buds, we can make them into capers in vinegar or fry them. The flowers can be used as an ingredient for the very famous jam from the Franche-Conté area of France called la cramayote. If you want to try it, here's a recipe you can pause the video when you want to make it. As for Dandelion roots, you can eat them as well, mashed, grilled or fried, and can use them as a coffee substitute. Very useful for brewing your own local coffee if you don't happen to have coffee trees growing around you. Here's a place where you wouldn't want to fall down, but where you can have plenty of nettles. Careful, it stings. If you have never tasted it before, I strongly encourage you to overcome your fear of the nettle sting. The only way to make sure not to get stung is to wear thick gloves. Alternatively, you can try picking the leaf from below, then roll it like this, and then you can eat it raw. Otherwise, nettle leaves are delicious in soup, in salad, if you chop them finally in pestles, you can even prepare nettle bread using dry nettle leaf powder. Nettle is very nutritious and contains most of the nutrients we need in our nutrition, minerals, vitamins, etc. In spring, its leaves can even contain up to 40% of its dry weight in protein. That's why nettle is traditionally used for its remineralizing properties and for the prevention of musculoskeletal pain, inflammation, such as rheumatism. The nettle root is also quite interesting as a traditional remedy for prostate disorders for men. And if we zoom out to look at the bigger picture, nettles are crucial for biodiversity. They host numerous insects and small animals which seek shelter among their stinging leaves. By doing so, they avoid being bothered by small mammals and also big ones like me. Here is a plant you should recognize easily. The common daisy, belis pirenis, is much more than just a pretty plant. It is also edible and can add some color to your salads. Just like the dandelion buds, daisy buds can be prepared like capers following this recipe. In a macerated oil, common daisies also make a wonderful skin-firming remedy. It was traditionally applied to aging skin to help it strengthen. You could potentially confuse the common daisy with the ox-eye daisy, le cantemum vulgaré, which is much bigger, also edible and even more delicious. Ah, here's another interesting plant and a very abundant one. This one is called garlic mustard aliaria petulata here at the seed stage. It's not a plant from the garlic family, but from the cabbage and mustard family. If you crumple its leaves, you will smell a subtle scent of garlic. And you can, of course, use it for cooking, preferably raw. Its roots, harvested in autumn, have a great wasabi taste. In springtime, you can peel the stem and eat them raw, they are deliciously sweet. Finally, its seeds can be harvested at the end of spring, beginning of summer, and ground to make your own homemade mustard. It's a delicious plant. Do you recognize this tree? There are several species of linden trees, both in Europe and in the States, and all of them are completely edible. The leaves have a nice subtle taste and can be eaten raw for most of the spring season in salad or cooked and also dried to be used as a flower mixed with others. The flowers make excellent herbal tea, and the seeds are very rich in healthy lipids. Environmentally speaking, its flowers rich in nectar and pollen are essential to many pollinators. Just by stopping by a linden tree in the end of spring and listen, there are so many insects, it feels like the tree itself is budding. It's important to protect our trees both in the forest and in the city. They act as important carbon traps. They protect us from overheating and their shelters for biodiversity. By cultivating trees more consciously, we could increase the surface area available for growing food, food on many levels from the ground well into the air. Perhaps this will become one of the solutions for feeding the whole planet in the future. You see, white plants are treasures and you can find them everywhere, even in cities. But of course foraging comes with risk. If you eat the wrong plant, you might end up in a hospital somewhere. But with a little bit of learning, anyone can start bit by bit. There are plenty of possibilities for getting started. Field trips with botanist and professional foragers, identification and foraging books and of course, hundreds of YouTube videos created by passionate people just like us. I truly believe that if we all gain more knowledge about nature, we will love it more and we will make more efforts to preserve its biodiversity. I hope you enjoyed this video, thanks for watching.