Foraging in Swedish Forests: Mushrooms, Berries and the Right to Roam

I grew up in a city. The closest I got to foraging was picking blackberries from a bush at the end of a suburban garden path. So when a Swedish friend handed me a wicker basket, pointed into a birch forest outside her family's cottage near Sundsvall, and said "go and find dinner," I was not immediately confident.

Three hours later I came back with two kilograms of chanterelles. Gold-yellow, trumpet-shaped, smelling of apricot and earth and something that I can only describe as the smell of a Swedish forest in late August distilled into fungal form. My friend's mother made them into a sauce. We ate them on toast with a glass of cold beer on a wooden deck over a lake, in the hour when Swedish summer evenings turn everything honey-coloured. I have been back to Sweden every August since.

Foraging in Sweden is not a niche hobby or a fashionable restaurant concept. It is a quiet, persistent aspect of how Swedish people relate to the landscape they live in. Families have favourite spots, passed down like property. Children learn species identification before they learn to read music. And Allemansrätten – the right to roam – makes every square kilometre of forest, field and coastline legally accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

Chanterelles: The Gold Standard

Kantarellen is the Swedish chanterelle, and it is the king of the Swedish foraging calendar. It appears from July onwards – sometimes as early as late June in a warm year – and peaks through August and into September. You find them under birch and pine, often in mossy ground with partial shade, often in places where the forest floor transitions between tree species.

They are almost unmistakable to anyone who has seen them once: egg-yolk to golden yellow, with false gills that run down the stem rather than meeting it cleanly, and a mild, distinctly fruity smell. The only common lookalike, the false chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca), is more orange, has true gills, and tends to grow in conifer forests rather than mixed woodland. False chanterelles are mildly toxic at worst. But you should learn to tell them apart before eating anything – join a guided walk first.

Good chanterelle years happen after warm, damp summers. Bad years happen after drought. Locals track the conditions obsessively from June onwards. Regional Facebook groups, Swedish foraging forums, and the apps Naturkartan and iNaturalist provide community sighting maps that are remarkably accurate. If you arrive in late August without having checked, ask at your accommodation – anyone with a connection to the local area will know whether it's been a good year.

Berries: The Long Season

The Swedish foraging year begins with wild strawberries (smultron) in June – tiny, intensely sweet things that you find on south-facing slopes and forest edges, and that disappear in your mouth before you can quite register having eaten them. They are almost never found in any quantity; they are a tasting, not a harvest.

Blueberries (blåbär) arrive in July across most of the country and continue through August. Swedish wild blueberries are smaller than the cultivated varieties you know from supermarkets but so much more intensely flavoured that the comparison feels unfair. They stain everything they touch a deep purple-black. Your fingers, your lips, the inside of your basket, eventually your shirt. This is not considered a problem.

Lingonberries (lingon) ripen in August and September and are arguably the most culturally important berry in Sweden – they accompany everything from meatballs to game to pancakes, in the form of the raw-stirred jam called rårörda lingon. They're found across the country in heather and lichen-rich pine forests, often growing in carpets that cover entire hillsides. Harvesting by hand is slow; most serious pickers use a berry rake, a comb-like tool that strips berries from the low shrubs in one pass.

Cloudberries (hjortron) are the Arctic luxury item of the Swedish berry world. They grow only in the bogs and marshes of northern Sweden – principally in Norrland and Lapland – and ripen in late July. Golden-amber when ripe, they taste like a cross between raspberry and apricot with an acidic edge, and they're used in jams, liqueurs and with whipped cream in the classic Swedish dessert hjortronsyllt med grädde. Picking spots are guarded with the same secrecy that mushroom hunters apply to their chanterelle patches. If someone tells you where to find cloudberries, consider it a significant act of trust.

The Best Regions

The forests around Sundsvall and Härnösand on the High Coast are regarded as some of the best chanterelle territory in Sweden, with mixed birch-pine woodland and the damp microclimate produced by the proximity to the Gulf of Bothnia. Dalarna, particularly the forests around Lake Siljan and the Orsa highland, produces excellent porcini (Karl Johan svamp) alongside chanterelles. The forests of Småland – darker, older, more dramatic than the open birch woods of the north – are particularly good in September for porcini and hedgehog mushrooms (Hydnum repandum).

For cloudberries, go north. The bogs of Norrbotten and the mountain marshes of Jämtland are the main production areas. The window for cloudberry picking is narrow – about two weeks in late July – and the locations remote. Plan accordingly.

Why Foraging Changes How You See a Landscape

There's something that happens after a few hours of foraging that has nothing to do with the food. Your attention shifts. You stop looking at the landscape as scenery and start reading it as a system of clues. The colour of the moss changes under a good chanterelle spot. The forest floor smells different twenty metres before you find a porcini. Your eyes start working at a scale they don't normally operate at – not horizon-scanning, but ground-level, slow, attending to individual square metres rather than panoramas.

This attentional shift is, I think, what people are really after when they talk about foraging as a practice rather than a method of food acquisition. It returns you to a perceptual relationship with a landscape that most of us have spent our whole lives losing. You go into the forest for the mushrooms. You come out having spent three hours in a state of complete, involuntary presence. That's not nothing.