Something I learnt from my mother [the late Rose Gray, co-founder of The River Café] was to look at a raw ingredient and then decide what to do with it. We moved to Italy as a family in the 1980s, where the local produce was of such good quality that you didn’t have to do much to it. In the local bar they sold enormous hunks of Parmesan, huge tins of salted anchovies, and fresh ricotta to be eaten that day. If we went for a walk, we might come across some porcini, or wet walnuts from the tree if they were ripe, and make a delicious, simple pasta sauce. Everything was seasonal and straight out of the ground.

When I was a child, we often stayed on the west coast of Scotland where we would go for long walks and end up on the beach, hungry. So we’d get a whole pile of rocks, pick mussels off the shoreline and then cook them on top of the rocks. We once picked up some lobsters from the fishermen and cooked them the same way––just slit them in half and baked them on top of the hot rocks.

At Petersham the chefs come in very early in the morning, go out into the garden and pick the flowers, such as borage––the appetiser we’ve got on at the moment. I feel privileged to walk around and say, “Look, there’s lots of little baby leaves on the beet here, let’s use the baby leaves in a salad.” At the moment I’m looking at three different types of chiccoria; you have it in Italy, shredded, and it’s a digestivo. Currently, we’ve got loads of different patches of courgette plants, of which we use the male flowers for zucchini fritti: you pick them in the morning, dip them in batter, and they make the most delicious appetiser.––Lucy Boyd, culinary director of Petersham Nurseries, London

Look out for the next Dining Al Fresco dispatch from Kurobuta on Saturday July 19.