For a city guy, Steve Brill has an unusual affinity for eating wild things. He also has a knack for finding them in unexpected places - like Manhattan's Central Park, or Prospect Park in Brooklyn, or Flushing Meadow Park in Queens. Brill is a forager, a connoisseur of the uncultivated plants that grow so profusely under our noses that we never seem to notice them. His enthusiasm for finding and cooking wild plants has earned him the nickname "Wildman."

From early spring through late fall, Wildman leads excursions through public parks in and around New York City, encouraging those of us with narrower definitions of "fit to eat" to take a closer look at the edible plants in our yards, parks, woods, and meadows.

It's a role he relishes, and he owes his success in part to a brush with the law. In 1986, he was arrested after a field trip and charged with criminal mischief for plucking and eating dandelions in Central Park. The incident produced spots on the national news and headlines like "Rangers Weed Out Wild Salad Eater" and "Teeth Off the Grass - Parks Muzzle Weed Maven."

The brouhaha was enough to persuade then Parks Commissioner Henry Stern to stop prosecuting Wildman and start paying him to open the public's eyes to a wilder side of food. Now he has an extensive schedule of tours in and around New York City, and has published two books, The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook: A Forager's Guide (in the Field or in the Supermarket) to Preparing and Savoring Wild (and Not So Wild) Natural Food, with More than 500 Recipes (Harvard Common Press, 2002) and Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places, with Evelyn Dean, (William Morrow & Co., 1994).

Spend a few hours foraging with Wildman, or even browsing through his books, and you'll begin to see unexpected connections between the "weeds" in your yard and the neatly arranged, highly tamed plants we're accustomed to finding in the produce section of a grocery store. Keep at it for a while, and you'll find yourself examining previously anonymous plants with new respect, both from your palate and your pocket book.

Are you a fan of herbal teas? Instead of heading for the store for your next supply, brew some free tea with twigs from the common spicebush.

Do you think you need dairy products to make tasty ice cream? Try Wildman's fresh blueberry frozen concoction, with free berries courtesy of some local wild place.

Want new vigor in your salads? Add fresh-picked wild onions or sheep sorrel to your store bought greens for concentrated flavors and extra bite.

Our family did that after a foraging trip through Central Park with Wildman - and 10-year-old John Henry was able to report to his class that he had sampled "Central Park Salad" with dinner. We also tasted Wildman's seductively creamy non-dairy "ice cream" and stashed away a handful of spicebush twigs for a future teatime.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the day was the chance to explore nooks and crannies of Central Park that most New Yorkers never take the time to see, let alone out-of-towners like us, who are usually too busy gazing at street sights to spend time with the wild things flourishing in the middle of Manhattan.

We emerged from the park with plastic bags bulging with edible plants, as if we'd just shopped our way through a well-stocked outdoor market. But we didn't spend a penny, aside from a nominal donation to Wildman - and all the plants we plucked are as abundant and quickly replenished as the dandelions in our yard.

Our adventure began on a chilly Sunday morning last November Wildman's last excursion of the year through Central Park. We gathered near Strawberry Fields, just across the street from the apartment building where John Lennon was gunned down more than two decades ago. That touch of nostalgia combined with 40-degree temperatures and the sputtering conclusion of a drizzling rain had dampened our expectations for this four-hour expedition. Although we followed instructions and came prepared with lunches, we weren't convinced we'd stay long enough to need them.

But then we set out through the park, accompanied by Wildman's endless store of naturalist's knowledge delivered in a cheerful banter, and all thoughts of leaving early were left behind.

We were walking on the wild side - or at least a wilder-than-usual side - of the food chain, and each time we discovered the overlooked potential in some common plant, our definition of food spread a little wider. We examined sumac, whose berries can impart an appealing sour flavor. Gather a few clusters, soak them in water at room temperature and you'll have your own wild pink lemonade. Or use the same liquid as a concentrate to flavor salad dressings or sauces. But be careful! Be sure the berries are red. The poisonous variety of sumac has white berries.

We found rose hips, which can bring a high price in health food stores, but which grow free and unfettered in the park. And we had a lesson in the importance of knowing what you're eating. As we passed through a wooded area, Wildman gathered us around a white snake root plant in the underbrush. The attractive white blossom gave no hint that eating these leaves would be a very bad idea.

"This plant has killed people who never even saw it," Wildman said.

Remember the story about Abraham Lincoln losing his mother while he was still a boy? The plant was to blame. According to Wildman, a cow wandering through the woods apparently munched on the leaves of a white snake root. The cow sloughed off the poison by discharging it through her milk. Mrs. Lincoln drank some of the tainted milk, took ill, and succumbed to what was then known as milk sickness.

Once people figured out the connection - Wildman says a Native American shaman pointed it out -cows were confined to pastures where their munching could be regulated.

If such stories of danger can perk up young ears, the thought of grossing out a few classmates can inspire prodigious energy. Just beyond the white snake root we came across a gingko biloba tree, which protects its nutritious nuts inside one of the foulest smelling fruits Nature produces.

"Sweet!" exclaimed John Henry, alert to the mischievous possibilities of the putrid and persistent odor, which Wildman notes in his new book "smells like vomit and must have acted as a dinosaur repellent 100 million years ago."

John Henry quickly gathered what seemed to be a pound or two of gingko fruit as we wondered aloud how to get it home to Baltimore without permanently stinking up the car. Wildman encouraged the hunt, assuring us that once the nuts are liberated from the fruit and toasted, they're tasty and nutritious.

"This is the best gingko collecting we've had all year," he noted. A storm the day before had shaken loose much of the season's fruit, and we had arrived before the gingko aficionados who usually rush into Central Park to gather it.

Like Wildman, those gingko gatherers are connoisseurs of foods that are not just free, but fun to find - and often more satisfying than grocery store fare.

Baruch Yageel, 24, has been foraging for about five years. He's "usually" a vegetarian - in part because wild food seems to satisfy him more easily than cultivated plants: "When you eat foraged food, you don't crave that much meat," he says.

Susan Wagenheim, a physician from Albany, New York, brought her 12-year-old son Greg Weiss to Central Park because he seems to have a natural affinity for plants. She would like both of them to be better acquainted with the plants he finds so that they will know when they're safe to eat. And what better way to build an affinity for wild plants than learning how they can offer a nutritious and tasty meal?

Wildman's approach to foraging stems from a love of nature that began with a children's book his mother read to him when he was a small boy in Queens. Combining that passion with his need to cook for himself as a young adult and his appreciation of good food, he has managed to raise foraging to a gourmet art.

A wise observer once noted that a weed is simply a plant out of place. If you tend to relegate plants to the weed category unless you consider them either beautiful or useful, let a well-informed forager stretch your mind - and give your palate some pleasant surprises.

Sheep sorrel has a stalked leaf that can growup to 4 inches long. It resembles a sheep's face, with a pointed tip like a nose and two lateral lobes at the base that resemble ears. Hang a leaf upside down, use a tiny bit of imagination, and you'll recognize the resemblance. Wildman suggests looking for sheep sorrel in meadows and fields with acidic soil throughout the United States. You can find it in spring, summer, and fall. It has a more pronounced taste than cultivated sorrel. It's good cooked and it adds a tart, lemony flavor to salads. Here's one of Wildman's sorrel recipes, good for spreading on bread, crackers, and muffins: