For a certain type of Barbour-clad middle-aged man, the best time of year is late summer, and the arrival of the grouse season. But if you’re in your twenties and living in Hackney, you’re more likely to get excited for spring and the arrival of wild garlic. Foraging has become a fashionable activity for twentysomethings. ‘Instagram has changed the game,’ says the nature writer and wild garlic picker Patrick Galbraith. ‘People love the foraging aesthetic.’

Some fans generously compare notes online on the most fruitful spots. Others gatekeep. The Instagram page ‘Real Housewives of Clapton’, which satirises the lifestyles of young bourgeois east Londoners, has gained a following making snide memes about hopeless amateurs foraging in Dr Martens.

We’re currently at the peak of wild garlic season. From the middle of February, woodlands across the UK break out in long green leaves. It is truly beautiful: the green is deep, like the feathers on a duck’s neck. It’s tempting to say it is unmistakeable, but no. There is an imposter, the poisonous lily of the valley. The trick to not putting your dinner guests in hospital is to smell the leaves: lily of the valley has no odour. Make sure you bring some scissors to slice through the leaves so the plant survives: foraging veterans often complain that the novices are uprooting everything.

The National Trust say that they ‘have seen some examples of commercial and unsustainable foraging in recent years’ and told people to take only one in 20 plants. Picking wildflowers is legal for personal consumption, but not commercial gain.

Yet Cornish locals say gangs are loading wild garlic into pickup trucks and selling it on to restaurants. One councillor said people should take down car number plates and contact the police, and a resident in Lostwithiel saw people slashing away with eight-inch knives and bin bags. Last year, a national newspaper ran a piece about the unsustainability of the wild garlic craze, followed two days later by a recipe for wild garlic macaroni.

So perhaps the trend is just another case of arrogant city-dwellers exoticising the countryside. But who cares? The plants can grow in Battersea Park, and the main outcome has been some respectable home cooking. In the past few years, I have been treated to delicious meals round people’s flats, most memorably a friend’s orzo with wild garlic pesto.

‘Wild garlic is so effortlessly good on so much,’ says Jeremy Lee, chef proprietor of Quo Vadis: ‘Coarsely chopped with walnuts for pesto, in soup, or risotto with nettles, ground with olive oil to make a pleasing unguent, in ricotta with anchovies, in polenta.’ Galbraith recalls shooting some rabbits with a friend, then making a wild garlic and rabbit pizza. Westerns Laundry, a restaurant in Highbury, has a dish of rabbit legs, asparagus, snails, mash and wild garlic.

Perhaps wild garlic’s appeal lies partly in its impermanence. Supermarkets stock most herbs and vegetables all year round but wild garlic has remained seasonal. ‘Its appointed hour is a delight at the time, and it never outstays its welcome,’ says Lee. ‘We bid a fond farewell and meet a year hence.’