Because Prospect Park includes so many varied habitats, it's loaded with shoots and greens in mid-spring, and many of these are edible and medicinal.

We'll begin with spicy hedge mustard and poor man's pepper greens, growing near the Grand Army Plaza entrance, proceed southeast to a vast stand of celery, parsley, and carrot-flavored goutweed, and stop for violet leaves and flowers at the edge of the path.

In an overgrown field, we'll find an abundance of pokeweed, superb boiled in 2 changes of water, as in Basic Pokeweed, but poisonous raw. It's especially good seasoned with soy sauce, plus garlic lightly browned in olive oil.

Later, we'll find vast stands of burdock, a despised "weed" with a delicious edible and medicinal root prized in east Asia. This time, we'll also find the immature flower stalks in season. Parboiled and peeled, they taste like artichoke hearts, as in Cardunes in Wine, an Italian delicacy.

After lunch, we'll find spicy field pennycress, another member of the mustard family, growing near corn-flavored chickweed. Not far off, we'll find spinach-flavored lamb's-quarters. Subsequently, we'll have our last chance of the season to find sour curly (yellow) dock leaves and stems before they go out of season.