But white bryony is even more striking. It looks like a wild vine with small poisonous fruits, like the deadly nightshade.

  ‘Also called wild pumpkin and crazy pumpkin because of its pumpkin-like leaves,’ he added. ‘And crazy because it is psychotropic.’

  Rocky sliced the root and dried it. He used to sell a lot to Greece. Last year, a German grower bought 300 kilos of fresh bryony root from him to plant in his greenhouses.

  ‘You make a salve from the slices. When you apply it to a sore back or slipped disc, it raises a terrific fever. It draws the inflammation from your body.’

  ‘Three hundred kilos seems a lot!’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I’m saying to you,’ Rocky said. ‘A lot of wild plants have disappeared already in Germany and other countries. And more will disappear. Humanity has got off the train, my friend. In a hundred years’ time we won’t be around to tell people about these mysterious things. Because a lot has been lost. Yet there is still elixir.’

  He handed me a small pack of dried ceps for my dinner.

  ‘But you’ve got to work for me!’

  I busied myself. A beaten-up pick-up truck arrived and a Roma family spilled out with bags and crates. I recognised the tall man in tatty clothes, with the sack and the old mouth, who hadn’t wanted a lift. Nafié sat at the desk inside, receiving the produce with a stern face, handing out cash from a drawer and writing amounts in a ledger.

  Chanterelles fetched 4 lev (2 euros) per kilo. Ceps fetched 8 lev (4 euros) for ‘first quality’ and 3 lev for ‘second quality’ which meant older ones, you could tell from their browner underside. The younger ones were lighter, perkier. A young woman brought a huge cep – 2 kilos. She had dark circles under her eyes and a tired smile. An old man came in, his Indian face etched with hardship.

  ‘Is that soggy cep?’ Rocky picked one up from the man’s crate. Some sprinkled their mushrooms with water to make them weigh more. ‘Don’t try to fool me, I have a university degree.’ But he didn’t say it harshly.

  The man started explaining but Rocky figured it out, it was fine. The ceps had ‘sweated’. They would dry later.

  ‘The old eyes let me down, mate,’ Rocky apologised. ‘And sometimes the hands let me down too.’

  The man was forgiving.

  ‘We’ve grown old, mate,’ he smiled with a wrecked mouth and I recognised him from a few days before. He’d arrived on a horse and cart with his wife when I was at Beslet with my guide. There, we witnessed a brutal scene.

  The Roma, who bivouacked without coming down, sold their harvest to a dealer from Thunder. The dealer arrived at four o’clock in a van full of empty crates and filled them with chanterelles and ceps brought to him by the sackful. He paid the same rate as Rocky. While my guide and I chatted to the dealer, two women got into a fight over a sack of chanterelles each said was hers and grabbed each other by the clothes and hair. One picked up a stake. The other picked an axe – her eyes were bloodshot, maybe she was drunk – and they both screamed and raised their weapons. I nearly screamed too.

  That sack of chanterelles fetched them 10 euros at most. The dealer from Thunder sold the produce to Italian dealers in the valley and these fungi would be either packed here and despatched, or sent off wholesale to Italy. I would next see them in my local deli in Scotland as ‘porcini’, priced at 10 pounds for 100 grams. The label would say ‘produce of EU’ or ‘made in Italy’ or ‘packed in the UK’, so that the consumer paid 100 pounds per kilo, while the pickers of that kilo received 4 pounds if they were lucky. True, for 1 kilo of dried mushrooms you need between 7 and 10 kilos of fresh ones, so the consumer pays not for one, but for up to 10 kilos.

  Either way, the consumer would be excused for not knowing that two women from the Mesta Valley nearly died for your porcini risotto tonight. The Indian-looking man stepped in and pulled the women apart, risking an axe in the head.

  ‘We sure have aged, mate,’ Rocky agreed with him. ‘It’s the system.’

  This Roma man had spent his youth picking berries, snails, primrose, whatever was going. Here were the world’s most skilled foragers, making a pittance for their tonnage, losing their teeth at forty and dying at fifty. The oldest person in the ’hood was a sixty-year-old woman. Men didn’t make it to sixty.

  A small boy stepped in with a single cep and Nafié weighed it.

  ‘Eighty grams, first quality.’ She gave him some change and the boy remonstrated coarsely. She spoke to him gently and he left, his head hung.

  Nafié sighed a veteran’s sigh.

  ‘It’s hard with the young Roma. They can’t count, they can’t read, they want money and they can get aggressive. You need a special understanding.’

  ‘Yet we rely on them,’ said Rocky. ‘They’re the only ones left.’

  There were a few other pickers; local women who came with a bucket of mushrooms, but ninety per cent of the foragers were Roma. A van arrived: three young Roma guys with sackfuls of leaf. It was dark on top and white on the underside.

  ‘Coltsfoot,’ said Rocky.

  In Bulgarian, it was called podbel, underwhite. And the shape of the leaves were just like the hooves of young horses, hence its English name, and the French folk name was pas d’âne, ass’s foot.

  ‘Good for coughs and stomach problems,’ said Rocky.

  I took some and started drinking it for a chesty congestion I’d had for a few weeks. The Latin name Tussilago, from ‘tussis’ for cough, adds to this plant’s description. One of its English folk names is cough wort. It was taken as tea by miners with damaged lungs and for centuries was smoked as a herbal tobacco by northern Europeans to relieve chest ailments like asthma. For persistent coughs, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommended this: burn coltsfoot leaves and inhale deeply through a reed straw, pausing in between each inhalation to sip warm red wine. Definitely something to try at home!

  It dawned on me that taken together, all the different names of a herb completed a pharmacopoeia. They described all the principal uses of the plant and its appearance.

  ‘I like people who can learn,’ said Rocky. ‘Come back next spring and I’ll take you places that’ll make your jaw drop.’

  Rocky and Nafié had children but no apprentices. Their plant lineage would end with them. That’s why they were delighted by my interest. It was a quiet tragedy.

  Meanwhile, the three guys brought staggering quantities of coltsfoot from their van. They had picked 69 kilos of this leaf in an afternoon, for which they received 35 lev (18 euros). That was 6 euros each.

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’ I asked one of them and flinched at my own question.

  He looked at me wildly. He was a red-headed guy, skinny and covered in tattoos, his face lined from working outdoors, his teeth already bad. Then he smiled, seeing my notebook. They were all skinny and prematurely aged, and regarded me curiously, not used to the attention. One had LOVE tattooed on his forearm.

  ‘We’ve grown up in the forest picking stuff,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

  It took them an hour to drive the broken road to Beslet, then an hour back to the ’hood. For 6 euros each, not counting the fuel, but they used old frying oil.

  ‘We’re used to it,’ another guy smiled and they climbed into the van. I felt the prickle of tears.

  Coltsfoot leaf and tincture are not cheap. For a kilo of dried coltsfoot at my favourite Napiers Herbalists in Edinburgh, you pay 54 pounds. And I saw how little Rocky and Nafié made on this rung of the distribution ladder. They were the key link in the chain: between forest picker and town buyer. They had to have plant knowledge and people knowledge because they operated at that point of contact between the two. From the next rung onwards, it was all human business. The pickers vanished into their slum, Rocky’s name was never mentioned again, the plant became a commodity and the trail back to the forest was lost. This coltsfoot would next appear in a pretty bag with a ribbon, in a smart boutique near you. Between forest floor and consumer, big bucks were made. But not by the Roma guys and not by Rocky.

  Coltsfoot likes disturbed soil where other plants have been removed, so there is plenty of it by my Beauly River. But nobody picks it. When I looked at the label of a coltsfoot bag from a wholesaler in Glasgow, the country of origin was Poland. To gather it, you have to crouch low and stay close to the ground and you would demand more than 6 euros for half a day of ‘unskilled work’.

  Unskilled workers: that’s how the British press describes the people who plant, harvest, process, package and bring food to our doorsteps.

  We stacked the crates of coltsfoot, making sure they were even at the top and not too densely packed so as not to crush or sweat the leaves. It was the last delivery of the day. Nafié would spend the evening tidying up. Tomorrow, the coltsfoot would be despatched to the next dealer who had it de-dusted, dried and shredded. Then a firm here or abroad bought the leaf, packaged it, stamped it with their logo and sold it to the final buyer, who would sell it to the consumer.

  ‘It’s the going rate,’ Rocky said, smelling my revulsion at the three pickers’ pay. ‘The big cut goes to the sharks. The ones with their fingers in the plant pies that take the subsidies and keep them for themselves. We’ve been sat on by the mafia for thirty years. But we are tough. We endure.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Nasko. ‘We endure.’

  Nasko the driver had just arrived, ready for the long drive. He was from Dogwood. Nasko’s generation were children of the Transition. That was the period after the fall of the regime in 1989. It was meant to be short but it has lasted thirty years. The first ten years were marked by mass emigration and armed grupirovki, racket gangs that called themselves businesses. Some of today’s big business owners in the region were part of that early mafia. Nasko’s peers had grown up in this slow-burn war zone, receiving brutal lessons in toxic masculinity.

  ‘And now I must earn an honest living. Impossible in this country. So I’ve got to pull asparagus in Germany.’

  We loaded up the crates. I sat with Rocky and Nasko in the driver’s cabin and we were off. Down the Kanina, up the Mesta through Maiden Gorge, to a town where the next dealer couple lived. They weighed the mushrooms again and their children loaded the crates into their own van. They were a gruff lot and regarded me with mistrust. Outsiders are an uncommon sight in this industry. As Rocky’s assistant, I wrote down the weight and price on a pad in large print. The mushrooms would be cleaned, cut and dried the following morning, then sold to dealers in nearby Bansko; of skiing fame.

  On the way out, I saw a patch of fresh nettles and Nasko insisted on picking me a bag, even without gloves. From him, I learned that you can avoid the sting of nettles by avoiding contact with the top of the leaves and only touching underneath the leaves. He worked fast and I could see how he made extra money for his overtime hours ‘pulling asparagus’ in Germany.

  We drove down a rocky flank with no people, just an eagle above.

  ‘Do you know that in Bansko dialect they address each other with “herb”?’ said Rocky. ‘You’re a strange herb.’

  Bilé. The same as wort in English or herbe in French. You’re a strange fruit. Mon petit choux.

  Rocky sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell it? The coal mine.’

  I couldn’t. The mine still worked, but at minimal capacity. Coal mining required large amounts of water and this resulted in water shortages in households when Mesta was exhausted.

  ‘Rocky’s special power is his sense of smell,’ said Nasko. ‘Smell doesn’t lie.’

  ‘You know how you get to know a plant once you pick it?’ Rocky said. ‘You put it on the table and leave the room. Then you enter the room again. And there it is. It fills the room.’

  We talked about food. Rocky liked everything as long as it had mushrooms in it.

  ‘How do you cook your green beans?’ Rocky turned to me in the dark cabin of the van. His face was a blur and that’s how the world was to him: a blur, smells, textures.

  ‘Put some ceps in and you won’t go wrong,’ he said.

  Mushrooms had been Rocky’s fortune and his misfortune. Rocky’s business was really taking off in the 1990s, then something happened.

  ‘I had mushroom for 7,000 euros in the house. Due to be loaded up in the van and delivered in the morning. They arrived at four in the morning and took it.’

  The armed racketeers. In the murky years, plant dealers were all visited by them and businesses were taken at gunpoint. They were that valuable. I heard about a local man who’d been put on a wood-sawing machine by racketeers and threatened to be chopped like a log unless he signed away his business to them: which he did and they prospered. There was just one village in Old Woods that kept its herbal business from the tentacles of the mafia back then. The villagers got together, organised and armed by a retired local general, and intimidated the racketeers by pushing their Jeeps into a precipice. The rest, like Rocky, had suffered the consequences of violent assault. And now they survived, but didn’t quite thrive in the post-gangster kleptocracy that had taken hold like a poisonous weed.

  After the shock of that loss, Rocky developed diabetes overnight, then eye damage that led to progressive blindness.

  ‘The guys who took his stock are now bigwigs,’ said Nasko.

  A mafia state is no less unjust than a dictatorship. For Rocky, it was worse, because there were no safety nets, no rules.

  ‘But cheer up! You’ve still come to the right place,’ Rocky nudged me. ‘You’ve found the loveliest spot around. It’s not a coincidence that I am a plant maniac. Watch out cos plant passion can consume you. You think you’re consuming the plant, but it’s the plant that consumes you.’

  When we got back, Nafié was tidying up. She was small under a tower of stacked crates. Tomorrow they would do the same: receive and sort deliveries from afternoon to midnight.

  They waved to me from the illuminated doorway of their tower of crates. I drove down the road to my dream house in the Empty Village. I wondered if they would ever retire. They couldn’t afford to, and anyway, would they want to draw the curtains and watch the telly? Perhaps they would. But I couldn’t imagine them without spring, summer, autumn and winter herbs, dead and living herbs, weighed and dried herbs, herbs felt and brought close to your face to inhale and munch because appearances are an illusion and the ungainly root contains untold beauty.

  I lay on my veranda. I couldn’t sleep. All I saw was ceps and coltsfoot. Their yellow-green shapes crowded me from the inside, as if I generated them myself.

  The second-century physician, Galen, mentions an earlier botanist’s account of a man who actually turns into a plant. Rocky was that person: half plant, half man. If I spent long enough with Rocky and Nafié, I’d go into a biophilic merger too. I already felt the first stirrings. It’s when you sense that being human is only half the story.

  Rocky suited his enchanter nickname. He had been mauled by the system but never lost his capacity for enchantment. Alchemists called this creative impulse imaginatio. Rocky had it and it was this that kept him going. ‘The imaginatio is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body,’ said the European alchemists, Astrum in homine coeleste sive supracoeleste corpus.

  There is nothing more tangible than 742 herbs, with 10 names each. Yet when I snaked down the road that imitated the river, the thought of anything growing in the darkness was enchanting. You had to imagine it to make it real, the way the earth had imagined it. Then in the morning, you saw that it was real and you were enchanted all over again.

  At night, everybody went underground. While the overground slept, the underground stretched, yawned, fed, hissed and conversed with 742 voices, and it’s easy to see how, pulled roughly from the ground without warning, the mandrake screams with a human voice.

  Elixir

  There is still elixir, Rocky said. El-iks-ir. A word like a forgotten mantra. The word is the thing. Even if you can’t spell it, you can taste it. It is an alchemical term that first appeared in the seventh century, and like alchemy, it goes as far back as the human search for meaning.

  But what is alchemy? We think of alchemy as the pseudo-science of turning base metals into gold. That kind of alchemy might never have existed in the first place. The true meaning of alchemy is transmutation and this is why alchemy has never gone away. The universe does it by itself, and humans at their best imitate, from primal matter into consciousness, from chaos to higher order. In a sense, alchemy is the very principle of becoming, a conscious process of unfoldment, with no beginning and no end.

  Alchemy is ancient. Its earliest recorded practitioners were in China and India. The Islamic Golden Age (from the ninth to the fourteenth century) was an apogee of medicine, alchemical philosophy and all the arts. The most influential of those early Eurasian renaissance men was the Persian Avicenna (or Ibn Sina, ‘son of Sina’) whose Book of Healing and Canon of Medicine shaped Western medicine in the centuries to come.

  The early alchemists of Eurasia grasped that there was no clear boundary between the visible and invisible dimensions. In the Alchemy of Happiness (Kimia yi-Sa’adat), the twelfth-century Persian Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali explores the nature of the contemplative life as if it is a sacred experiment conducted in a cosmic laboratory. Eastern mystics like him and Western mystics like his contemporary Hildegard of Bingen had a lot in common and it is no surprise that spiritual teachings moved from East to West.

  In the twentieth century, the pioneering Swiss psychologist Carl Jung brought the forgotten world of alchemy into the modern age, polished it symbol by symbol and made it shine again. ‘The fact is that the alchemists had little or nothing to divulge in the way of chemistry, least of all the secret of goldmaking,’ he writes. The alchemical opus deals with psychological and spiritual matters dressed in ‘pseudochemical language’. Jung decoded the alchemical dreams of the Graeco-Egyptian philosopher Zosimos of Panopolis who described elemental creation, the death and rebirth cycle and the Earth’s relationship with the cosmos in metaphors. ‘It is a stone that is not a stone,’ Zosimos concluded about the philosopher’s stone.