The wild bunch

Brightening up an autumn dinner needn't cost a fortune ÿ if you know where to pick wild, edible flowers. Peace and love, says Michael Bateman

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Cep Salad with buffalo ricotta

Pan fried scallops with borage, radicchio and chicory

White risotto with wild flowers

Go on. Admit it. Winter's not a bad thing. In the kitchen, at least, the change of seasons keeps chefs on their toes. But right now, while we're still feeling cheated because of dark evenings and the need for overcoats, what's called for at dinner is something that looks exotic and tastes fresh. And before you roll your eyes at the thought of expensive luxuries from far-flung places, neither of those concerns apply here, for there's a free source that's close to home. As close as the path to your front door. Or the grass verge by the road where you live, the playing field, park or any patch of green.

A new cuisine has been developed which uses edible flowers, and many of them are free for the picking, right under your nose. The petals are a perfect source of stunning woodland colours. And don't immediately dismiss this as over-fussy decoration. Every single bloom and petal contributes flavour, whether it is pink rose or a blue borage flower, orange marigold flowers, purple verbena, blue chicory or green bladder campion leaves.

I've come to Marden in Kent to meet Claudio Binocoletto, a man who knows all about flowers and brightening up a dinner plate. Against a "Garden of England" backdrop – undulating hills punctuated by oasthouses – we set out across the field he rents from an organic farmer. In an accent that tells me hasn't lost a love of his motherland, he begins to speak a little about himself – that he's 39, comes from a farming family north of Venice and, after national service, studied botany at Padua University.

There it was that he gained the knowledge required to start growing unusual herbs for the table. "But in north Italy, rich people didn't think much of wild herbs. It was peasant food like beans or pasta, though now attitudes have changed their opinions and everyone is interested." So, four years ago, Binocoletto came to England. He worked as a cook at Orso and helped find produce for the book Antonio Carluccio Goes Wild. But, more importantly, he began growing specialist herbs and salad leaves which, he found, were in demand among the Italian fraternity, which was missing fresh produce from home – imported wild leaves don't stay fresh. He has now built up a business as a supplier to more than 30 restaurants in the capital, most of them Italian. His clients include some of London's top chefs, including Isola's Graziano Bonacina (more on him later).

The field shows little sign of cultivation, and it's bordered by brambles and stinging nettles. These are there for a reason, of course, as they're a great source of wild food. In season, he will charge £8 to £10 per kilo for his nettles – chefs use the very young shoots in soups and purées. "It's a very valuable plant," he says, "if you wash your hair with a solution of nettles, the next day it will be silky and glowing with health." He also harvests hops, but not for beer – he sells the shoots to chefs for £25 a kilo. "You can pick and eat the shoots in spring," he says. "Snap them off when they're about 8in long and about as thick as your thumb, then eat them like asparagus, or chop them up for a risotto or frittata."

It's going to be slow progress through this field – Binocoletto has a story and medicinal use for every plant we pass. All of them are very nice to know, but I've come here to find out about cooking with flowers. Is it too late in the year to find enough flowers to cook with? Certainly not, he says. Sure, if we'd have been here a few months back, the choice would have been greater, but there's something so precious about the flowers Binocoletto finds in autumn. First there's borage, one of that has a longer season. Though it's not often part of English cooks' repertoires, Italians prize the hairy, bushy plant as a vegetable and chop its leaves and stems to make a purée to mix with ricotta as a stuffing for ravioli. Binocoletto has also found that the pretty blue flower tastes delightful, like cucumber.

Binocoletto puts the borage flowers in a glass jar – that's the best way to transport blooms without damaging them – and we move on to the next blooms. The most dazzling blue flowers, as bright as cornflowers, turn out to be the petals of the chicory plant. The chicory family includes red and green radicchio (think fat lettuces) and cicoria (a dandelion-like plant). But in their second year, the stems "shoot" and produce lovely bright flowers, perfect in salads as they have a deliciously bitter tang.

We taste calendula (bright orange marigold flowers), blue sage flowers and pink willowherb. We taste the tiny white flower of Shepherd's Purse, a cross between mustard and cabbage. We also find a tiny, spiky white flower, Agnoscastus vitex (Binocoletto doesn't know the English name, though in Italy it's known as the chastity plant) and some winter savoury (which conversely is taken to stimulate the sexual urge).

An impressive display, in all. But Binocoletto has more – he took a stroll through a local park on his way here this morning, just to prove his claim that you can forage a flower feast for yourself – and found blue delphinium, silver artimesia, lilac-coloured verbena, pink wild geranium, begonia, South African daisy, scabious, rose petals. We taste them as critically as if they were wines. "In Italy we taste things thoroughly, we chew and chew," says Binocoletto. "In this country, people just eat."

So how did he progress from supplying herbs to inventing a new cuisine around flowers themselves? For that, he says, we must visit Graziano Bonacina, his friend at Isola. We get on the train back to London, and a few hours later arrive at the Knightsbridge restaurant. Binocoletto hands over the flowers. "Claudio would bring me salad leaves and herbs, things I thought you could only find in Italy," says Bonacina. "But he'd often bring a few flowers too, not only courgette flowers and thyme flowers but some very unusual ones. He'd say, 'Try this,' and we'd discuss the flavours and what I could do with them. Then, one day, we realised we could put together a whole menu based around them."

And that's exactly what they did. To showcase their innovations, they're taking over Isola for one night next Wednesday. Four courses (a salad course, risotto, scallops, cream or chocolate puddings) each featuring blooms of all descriptions, for a set price of £45 per person. You can create something similar by following Bonacina's recipes (see previous page). It's a wonderful idea, I think, but I have to ask Bonacina – a chef with a seriously classical training, including a spell at the hard school of Marco Pierre White – whether Binocoletto's suggestions seemed, well, a bit flowery. He confesses that the idea of decorating any of his dishes with flowers has always struck him as absolutely naff. "At least, I did until I met the Flower Man," he quickly adds, referring, of course, to Binocoletto. "He really knows his food." *

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