Harvesting from an Edible Forest

Nestled between the Bronx River and the Whitlock Avenue subway stop is the Bronx River Foodway. It’s an edible plant forest where people can forage for their own food.

Every week, herbalist and forager Journei Bimwala harvests the plants and teaches community members how they can use them for both medicinal and edible purposes. She has a goal to make the unfamiliar familiar – especially when it comes to invasive species.

“They have all of this amazing usefulness,” Bimwala said. “How do we utilize them and not villainize them?”

Bimwala’s free tours allow people in the Bronx to build a relationship with nature and harvest plants that might cost more at the grocery store.

The Bronx resident was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and lived in France for some of her childhood. She moved to New York City when she was 12.

Bimwala relates to the invasive plants because she said people often treat them as outsiders in the same way they do immigrants in the United States.

“I wasn’t born here, so the way they always talk about them, I always feel like they’re talking about me,” Bimwala said. “You just don’t know them. Get to know these plants.”

Unlike traditional gardens, the plants aren’t sectioned off by planter boxes or pots. Dense foliage sprawls across the land freely. Native species, like mountain mint, grows alongside invasive mugwort and bindweed on both sides of the pathway.

Each plant offers something different, and Bimwala pointed them out along the tour.

One section she highlighted was the forest’s berry wall of golden raspberries and elderberries. According to the National Institutes of Health, elderberries are promoted as supplements to aid colds and the flu, though there’s not enough scientific research to show their health benefits.

The Bronx River Foodway is located in the Longwood section of the borough. It sits in Concrete Plant Park, which used to be an abandoned concrete factory site.

“The story of this park is one that I think is familiar for the Bronx – one of reclamation,” said Nathan Hunter, the project's coordinator.

The community and a nonprofit organization, the Bronx River Alliance, worked to restore the space into a park, which opened in 2009.

Hunter and Bimwala work together every day to take care of the Foodway, which was started by the NYC Parks Department back in 2017.

Bimwala said she always loved plants as a child, but her interest was sparked again as she was homeschooling her children.

“The easiest thing to start teaching your children is nature,” she said. “You just go out and you observe.”

The herbalist’s search for alternative uses of native and invasive plants really kicked off when she went on a tour of the Foodway forest, led by a park ranger. When she asked about the use of a weed called mugwort, the park ranger said it was poisonous. However, she was skeptical.

“I’m smelling the plant and I’m like, there's no way nature is going to give us a plant that smells like this and it's supposed to be bad,” Bimwala observed.

After doing some research, she found that weed is used in Asian medicine. According to a paper in the National Library of Medicine, researchers have found some beneficial health properties of mugwort.

Now, the Foodway team hosts a mugwort celebration each year.

Bimwala and Hunter said they hope the edible forest project helps younger New Yorkers appreciate nature.

“If we don't have people falling in love with nature, then we're gonna lose it,” Hunter said. “Now more than ever, we need advocates and leaders that come from the young generations to really shape our future because it's theirs.”

Once the tour is over, the two gardeners head back to their daily harvesting and weeding. The plants are soaking in the sun of the hot summer day — quiet retreat from city traffic outside.

This interview aired on the What’s What podcast from WFUV News on July 22, 2025.