Last Updated on October 21, 2024
If your idea of tea only involves something in a little bag you buy at the supermarket, get ready to enjoy loads more wild flavors! Here’s what to know about wild plants you can use to make delicious wild tea all year round.
Table Of Contents
- WHY MAKE FORAGED WILD TEA?
- WHAT EXACTLY DO WE MEAN BY 'TEA'?
- SAFELY FORAGING WILD TEA
- WILD TEAS TO TRY THIS SEASON
- PINE NEEDLE TEA
- SPRUCE TEA
- HAWTHORN BERRY TEA
- MULBERRY LEAF TEA
- ELDERFLOWER TEA
- ELDERBERRY TEA
- ROSEHIP TEA
- LINDEN FLOWER TEA
- BIRCH TEA
- VIOLET TEA
- DANDELION TEA
- GOLDENROD TEA
- GINKGO LEAF TEA
- NETTLE LEAF TEA
- YARROW TEA
- GROUND IVY/CREEPING CHARLIE TEA
WHY MAKE FORAGED WILD TEA?
Of course, it’s easy to pick up tea at the store and brew tea using the prepackaged little bags. So why seek out wild tea?
First, collecting wild plants and making tea from them is fun! And you get to try SO many new flavors.
Better still, there’s no waste: When you forage your tea, there’s no bag, no box, no shipping, no air pollution. It’s about as zero waste and eco-friendly as you could possibly get.
Consuming a wider variety of plants is also great for promoting health. Our modern diets generally rely on an astonishingly small number of plants. Foraging wild plants for tea means you consume a much wider array of health-promoting polyphenols.
Ready to give wild tea a try? Here are some top wild plants to try foraging for tea this season!
WHAT EXACTLY DO WE MEAN BY ‘TEA’?
If you want to be precise, ‘tea’ technically refers to the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), an evergreen shrub used to make black, green, and white tea. The tea plant is where we get most of the caffeinated teas people associate with the word tea.
But the broader term tea is also used to encompass any drink made by infusing leaves, fruit, roots, or bark in water. Often referred to as an infusion, herbal teas you’re familiar with — like peppermint or chamomile, for example — fall into this category.
Most of the foraged wild teas listed below are similar, made from dried plant material steeped in water. The parts of the plants that don’t extract as readily, like bark and berries, are typically simmered on the stovetop and are technically a decoction rather than ‘tea.’
But for our purposes — which is to make yummy, flavorful drinks — we’ll just simplify things and call them all tea.
SAFELY FORAGING WILD TEA
Of course, it’s absolutely critical to be sure you’ve correctly identified any plant you intend to eat or brew into tea, as many have poisonous look alikes.
Let’s review the fundamentals of safe foraging:
- Positively ID plants you intend to forage: Misidentifying a plant can be dangerous, even fatal. Use a reliable field guide and make positively sure you’ve correctly identified any plant you intend to ingest. When in doubt, don’t eat it.
- Obey the law: Some wild areas will have regulations regarding foraging, particularly national and state parks. Check the rules and be sure to get permission before foraging on private property.
- Harvest sustainably: Take only what you will use, and make sure to leave plenty for wildlife and plant regeneration. A good guideline is ten percent, unless it’s an invasive plant like garlic mustard. Then pull up as much as you possibly can!
–> Always consult a thorough and trustworthy foraging guide. The BEST guide I’ve ever found is Sam Thayer’s new Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. It covers of hundreds of edible wild plants and includes a new method for identifying plant. Because it covers so many plants, it’s a bit heavy, so you might check out some less comprehensive foraging books that cover fewer plants but weigh less.
This post doesn’t include details on plant identification, but in most cases I link to posts with ID information. Always read carefully about how to recognize a plant using multiple features before harvesting or eating.
If you’d like to hone your plant identification skills, be sure to check out Herbal Academy‘s numerous online courses about botany, foraging, and herbal medicine.
You can forage wild plants and brew your tea fresh, or you can dry them to use later. I highly recommend drying some of your harvest to enjoy at other times of year. Having those lovely seasonal flavors available when nothing else is growing is a wonderful way to help those of us who hate winter muddle through.
I highly recommend a collapsible drying screen. I love that it has tons of space for laying out the many different herbs I gather each season but folds up into a small circle that I can tuck away out of season.
I’ve used it to dry huge quantities of foraged Canadian wood nettle, plantain, linden flowers, goldenrod, elderflowers, birch leaves, and so much more.
If you can’t forage your own wild teas, you can find many of these wild ingredients available online. I highly recommend Mountain Rose Herbs for the best quality herbs. You can also find some herbs from Frontier (best prices through sales at Vitacost, some also available on Amazon) and Starwest.
Love learning about green living hacks and medicinal plants? Follow HealthyGreenSavvy on Pinterest or like HealthyGreenSavvy on Facebook to keep up with the new ones I share every day!
WILD TEAS TO TRY THIS SEASON
There are so many wild teas to choose from! Some are truly delicious, while others may be more of an acquired taste, and others might be considered ‘medicinal,’ things you’ll likely only drink when you have an illness you’re trying to fight. I’ll sort them accordingly, highlighting the teas considered tastiest first.
PINE NEEDLE TEA
No matter what time of year you’re reading this, you can find pine needles to forage. Pine needles are valuable edible and medicinal ingredients to know about, whether you want to use them in cooking or medicinally.
Pine needles have a pleasant, bracing flavor that tastes like a pine tree smells. It’s enjoyable to drink, but also extremely helpful when you’re dealing with a respiratory illness.
Check out this recipe for pine needle tea and explore the many other pine needle uses to try.
Make sure you know about identifying common conifers so you get the right ones. Find out more about distinguishing the commonly confused spruce vs fir pine.
SPRUCE TEA
Like pine tea, spruce tea has a bright, pine-y flavor that’s quite pleasant and also considered medicinal. High in vitamin C, spruce makes a nice cup of wintertime tea.
Learn more about foraging spruce needles for tea in our post about spruce tea.
HAWTHORN BERRY TEA
Hawthorn berry tea has a tart, fruity flavor. An excellent herb for supporting cardiovascular health, it’s brimming with antioxidants. It’s also very tasty and one of several cooling herbs to reach for when temperatures soar.
Learn more about foraging hawthorn berries in our post on making hawthorn berry tea.
MULBERRY LEAF TEA
Mulberry trees offer us not just a bountiful crop of delicious mulberries, but also plentiful leaves that are edible as a wild green in the early stages of growth, and as an excellent wild tea anytime during the season. Mulberry leaf tea has a smooth, pleasant flavor and is rich in antioxidants.
Find out what to know about sourcing mulberry leaves and brewing tasty mulberry leaf tea.
ELDERFLOWER TEA
Elderflower tea has a delightful floral flavor and is a top wild tea to forage. You can forage elderflowers at the beginning of summer and make tea with either fresh or dried flowers. Some people find fresh flowers harder on the stomach, so if that’s a concern, consider using dried.
Here’s what to know about correctly identifying elderflowers and an elderflower tea recipe to try.
ELDERBERRY TEA
Elderberry tea is a go-to for fighting off cold viruses, though its fruity flavor is so pleasant you can drink it anytime.
To get the most medicinal benefit from elderberry tea, you don’t simply infuse it in water, but decoct it on the stovetop. Find out more about the best way to make elderberry tea.
ROSEHIP TEA
Rose hip tea is a fruity, antioxidant-rich drink you can make with either fresh or dried rosehips. It tastes great hot or cold and has some excellent medicinal properties. Rose hips are rich in polyphenols, which can help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress.
Learn more about making rose hip tea.
LINDEN FLOWER TEA
Linden flowers make a lovely floral tea. If you’re lucky enough to harvest linden flowers when they’re around in early summer, you can preserve their lovely flavor to enjoy all year.
You can also buy linden in bulk from Mountain Rose Herbs and other sources online. When you taste linden flower tea, you’ll want to keep it on hand to enjoy often.
BIRCH TEA
Birch tea is a fun wild tea to know about, since you can source fallen birch twigs for tea long after the foraging season has wound down. You can also use birch leaves, which can be dried and used later as well.
Birch tea has a pleasant wintergreen flavor that adds variety to your foraged tea repertoire.
Check out our foraging guide and recipe for birch tea as well as more information on distinguishing birch vs aspen.
VIOLET TEA
Wild violet tea is a fun spring tea to make using flowers to turn the tea a pretty light blue. With a much longer season than the flowers, violet leaves are a helpful tea ingredient to know about.
On their own, violet leaves make a kind of grassy-flavored tea with a fair amount of mucilage. I tend to add them to the nighttime blend I make during the growing season, along with lemon balm, catnip, and yarrow I collect from the garden.
Violet leaves are considered helpful for coughs, so I also dry a bunch toward the end of the season to keep on hand for colds through the winter. Learn more about additional herbs for cough and be prepared when colds strike.
DANDELION TEA
Most people don’t realize that abundant dandelions are tasty and versatile, as well as really good for you. You can actually make tea from the flowers, leaves, or roots to enjoy at different points in the season.
Find out about how to make dandelion tea using different parts of the plant as well as numerous other wonderful uses for dandelions.
Dandelions are among the top wild edible plants for those newer to foraging to try.
GOLDENROD TEA
Goldenrod is a wonderful medicinal plant to know about, especially for those with seasonal allergies. It’s also considered a helpful respiratory herb and useful for supporting kidney functions.
Learn more about goldenrod identification and benefits and check out this goldenrod tea recipe.
GINKGO LEAF TEA
Those pretty ginkgo leaves aren’t just ornamental, they’re also rich in beneficial compounds. Ginkgo leaf tea has a mild green flavor and may be useful for addressing inflammation and promoting cardiac health.
Learn more about foraging ginkgo leaves and using them to make ginkgo biloba tea.
NETTLE LEAF TEA
Nettles are wonderfully nutritious and easy to forage in spring or buy dried online. Nettle tea is pleasant flavored and a go-to for dealing with seasonal allergies.
Find out more about nettle leaf tea benefits, and learn about foraging Canadian wood nettle, a milder-tasting stinging nettle relative that can be used interchangeably.
YARROW TEA
Yarrow is an easy-to-find herb that has many medicinal uses, from reducing fever to balancing hormones to stopping bleeding and aiding digestion. Read our post on yarrow benefits to learn more.
Yarrow tea isn’t the tastiest on its own, so if you want to reap yarrow’s benefits you can use it with other more palatable herbs. You can also flavor it with some lemon and honey, which is nice when you’re dealing with a cold.
GROUND IVY/CREEPING CHARLIE TEA
I would definitely consider ground ivy in the acquired taste/medicinal category. This is not a tea I’ll reach for unless I’m feeling unwell — and then it’s the FIRST thing I reach for. A strong infusion of ground ivy is often the only thing that helps me get over that blecch feeling that comes with a bad cold.
Here’s more on identifying creeping charlie. It’s a valuable medicinal plant worth getting to know. Learn more about creeping charlie uses.
There are plenty of other plants to try making tea from as well:
- Sumac
- Wild mint
- Rose petals
- Clover flower
- Plantain
- Teaberry (Wintergreen)
- Rosehips
- Sassafras
- Blackberry leaf
- Wild chamomile (aka pineapple weed)
- Wood sorrel
- Bee balm
If you love the idea of harvesting your own nutritious and medicinal plants, be sure to read more about foraging wild herbs.
Do you have a favorite wild tea? Please leave a comment with your suggestions!
Save this info on foraging wild tea for later!
Disclaimers: Though HealthyGreenSavvy and EcoSavvy Writing LLC always aim to provide thorough and accurate information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any consequences, health issues, or symptoms that arise from ingesting or touching any plant described on this website. It is always the reader’s responsibility to ensure accurate plant identification and use multiple reputable sources to confirm. If you have any doubts about the identification of any plant, do not eat it.
Susannah
Susannah is a proud garden geek and energy nerd who loves healthy food and natural remedies. Her work has appeared in Mother Earth Living, Ensia, Northern Gardener, Sierra, and on numerous websites. Her first book, Everything Elderberry, released in September 2020 and has been a #1 new release in holistic medicine, naturopathy, herb gardening, and other categories. Find out more and grab your copy here.