Where do the elderflowers grow?

And the wild rose? What about the fat hen and samphire? So often I have imagined a life huddled around a fire, wrapped in blankets and clutching mugs of homemade coffee ground from dandelion roots. Everyone together, living outdoors in harmony with all around them.

I'm not talking about some long lost civilization or primitive race still living hidden in a far away place, but people who, for one reason or another, find themselves living in cities, isolated from nature and domesticity, living their lives in cramped spaces with no room to breathe. I'm talking about people like me. 

All of my waking hours while travelling by car in the UK were filled with my obsession with finding these edible plants. Elderflowers for making cordial or champagne, wild rose for tiny pots of intensely sweet jam and those dandelions, each part of which can be used in some way. 

We would drive for hours and hours whilst I scanned the road side bushes and trees, my heart lifting every time I glimpsed the merest hint of delicate white sprays or pastel pink petals. How I wanted to pick them, to gather and harvest, to make the delicacies and wonders lamented about in books and magazines.  To spend time with my parents, helping me render down the petals to a thick pink jam, measuring the temperature and testing the sweetness. But I knew that the moment was almost past, and once back in Vancouver, struggling to grow tomatoes on my tiny balcony, all this would just be a romanticized ideal. 

Yes, there are elderflowers here, but I have yet to find them. I have one small bush growing on my balcony that has doubled in size but, so far, failed to produce any flowers. The wild roses are prolific in our large rain forest, but like the salmon berries and other edible plants, they are illegal to pick and so beyond reach.

Maybe it's a feeling of confinement, or of not being able to embrace a new culinary concept of foraging and self sustainability, or, perhaps, it's much deeper than that.

My brother in law and his wife have a huge garden complete with vegetable beds, a greenhouse and a shed. I imagine what it would be like to make my own wine, cure hams and Prosciutto, grow my own cucumbers and have a barbecue every weekend, because all this is just fantasy to me now.