Sharon runs Wild Irish Foragers with her family on a fifth-generation farm near Shinrone, but the business began by accident rather than design. One day, while blackberry picking with her youngest daughter, she was asked about a rosehip in the hedge and realised her children did not know the wild plants that had once been part of her own upbringing. Her grandmother had passed that knowledge down to her, and Sharon realised she had not yet done the same. She gathered rosehips, went home, and dug out her grandmother’s recipe for rosehip syrup. She began to relearn what had been forgotten. Not from books alone, but from the land itself. From hedges, fields and seasons.

What started as family use soon grew into something more. Sharon made rosehip syrup, then elderberry syrup, and when a friend suggested she sell the surplus at a small market in Nenagh, she tried it. She arrived with a picnic table and sold out. That was the moment she realised there might be a future in it.

She began researching the forgotten culture of wild food in Ireland and realised how much knowledge had been lost. She learned that after the Famine, eating wild food became associated with poverty: “if you ate out of the ditch, you were poor.” That stigma helped push wild foods to the margins. When wild garlic later became fashionable, people suggested she move into pesto-like products, but her father-in-law put her straight: “It’s far from pesto you were raised. Keep doing what you’re doing.” That became their guiding ethos. Instead of chasing trends, they would return to old Irish recipes, find preparations used a century or more ago, and bring them back in small-batch form.

On the farm, Sharon and her husband see themselves as caretakers rather than exploiters. They take only a third of what grows, leaving the rest for wildlife and for renewal. In an era when many farms are pushed to maximise output, they resist pressure to upscale. Instead, they work within the limits of the land and the season. If a patch is poor, they leave it alone.

Her husband rotates where he harvests hawthorn and other plants, and he grafts and rewilds too. One field now carries rowan, elderberry, hawthorn, and rosehips, while dandelions, buttercups, and other wildflowers return on their own.

Their products are sold through independent shops and health food stores, and Sharon makes them all herself in small batches: about thirty-five bottles of rosehip syrup at a time. She calls herself “a one-pot woman” and is content with that simplicity.

Asked about historic uses of wild food in the Shinrone area, Sharon says the record is thin, perhaps because of the same post-Famine stigma. Family stories suggest people went to the Slieve Bloom or Kingsley Mountains to gather wild plants, and she knows her father-in-law’s mother fed her children nettles mixed with cabbage in spring as a kind of tonic. Beyond fragments like those, she finds a gap in recorded local memory.

Yet she also sees traces of older, more enchanted relationships with place. The area is dotted with ring forts or fairy forts, many left untouched out of tradition, superstition, or respect. Her own land has one. She tells of her father-in-law cutting a tree at its edge and falling ill for days afterwards, and of a large stone moved before they realised it likely belonged to the fort. The day after moving it, her husband fell down the stairs and broke his leg. More odd things followed until she insisted it be put back. They returned it to the ring fort, placing it beneath a hollow crab apple tree that bears fruit every year. Later, a visitor identified it as an old millstone. She says it will never be moved again.

When asked about plants with magical powers, Sharon chooses the dandelion. Around her home, there is no formal ornamental garden, only places where things choose to grow: sumac and lupins brought by birds, wild fennel and mallow appearing for a few years before giving way to something else, and above all a sea of dandelions. In front of the house lies a nine-acre field her husband calls “the field of wishes.” Dandelions, Sharon says, have their own rules: you cannot pick them before the dew has dried, and once picked they close almost immediately. Later, when the seed heads rise, the field becomes shimmering and wish-filled. Her husband goes walking along a raised “beech walk” at the edge of this field, saying he is “going down to say thanks to the field of wishes.” For him, that is a place of gratitude and quiet communion.

In her view, reconnecting with wild food cannot be a passing trend; it must be rooted in history, care, and an understanding of how earlier generations lived with the land. Still, she worries that traditional knowledge is being sidelined. Foraging, she says, has taught her one plain truth: she is not that important, and nobody is. If you step back, nature will provide — for people or for wildlife — but humans are not in charge. The land should be in charge of us. Her hope is simple, that when she and her husband “shift off this mortal coil,” they will have left no negative trace, and that the farm will still be as pure in a hundred or two hundred years as it was before them.