Useful plants and their uses in Italian

The last entry is la raccolta spontanea, and the adjective is the trap, because the same word exists in English and does a different job. Said of a plant, spontaneo means growing where nobody sowed it: la flora spontanea of a hillside is its wild flora, and le specie spontanee are the ones that were already there. Our « spontaneous » went the other way. It describes an act with no outward cause and no plan behind it — a spontaneous decision, spontaneous applause, spontaneous combustion — so it speaks about the manner of an event and never about where a living thing came from. Call a hedgerow plant spontaneous in English and you suggest it did something sudden. The words we actually use come from three different places: « wild » for the plant itself, « self-sown » for the one that seeded itself in a bed, and « a volunteer » for the potato that comes up in this year’s wheat — the only one of the three that sounds like a person. For the activity named here, English says « wild harvesting », or, when it is done on foot and by hand, « foraging ».