A great abundance of edible and medicinal wild plants and mushrooms makes this park a great place for edible and medicinal plants in the fall.

Burdock, an expensive detoxifying herb sold in health food stores, abounds in cultivated areas throughout the park. You can also use it as a superb root vegetable.

The root of sassafras, which tastes like root beer, makes a great tea. Common spicebush (which also has allspice-like berries) and ground ivy (a gentle herbal diuretic) provide still more beverages.

Everyone will also find plenty of leafy green vegetables, such as hedge mustard, wood sorrel, goutweed, lamb’s-quarters (wild spinach), chickweed (which tastes like corn), poor man's pepper, Asiatic dayflower, and lady’s thumb.

Nuts are coming into season. Hickory nuts, delicious but never commercialized, litter the sidewalk 1/4 mile south of the Picnic House. Hazelnut bushes drop their nuts along the edges of the Mall just north of the skating rink, but we'll have to race the squirrels to the nuts.

Beech trees grow throughout the park, but whether this year's crop will be a boom or bust is anyone's guess. White oak acorns, scrumptious after leached of their bitter tannin, are also widespread. And the first scrumpious black walnuts will be littering paths in various locations. We'll also find the seeds of the Kentucky coffee-tree, for making the world's best caffeine-free coffee substitute.

Gourmet fruits are represented by native hawthorn berries, relatives of apples, used in herbal medicine as a heart tonic. There may even still be some elderberry bushes in season.

Spectacular mushrooms abound if there's been enough rain beforehand. Huge hen-of-the woods (sold in health food stores as maitake), gigantic chicken mushrooms (which really taste like chicken), golden-brown honey mushrooms, and savory wine-cap stropharia mushrooms could pop up anywhere.