It was a tribute to the mothers of the dawn age.

All across the nation, other women were eating eggs Benedict or lolling in bed with a third cup of coffee and the kind of toast that only a 6-year-old can make.

In the sunny Santa Monica Mountains, a group of 26 people wound single file along a dirt trail, hunting for a very different kind of Mother’s Day brunch.

The group, including several mothers and at least one grandmother, were looking for wild plants to eat.

In a way, their expedition made a tribute to the ancient mothers of the race, who nourished primitive humanity and its hairier ancestors through the millennia as hunter-gatherers. Some anthropologists now figure that as providers, male hunters may have been as reliable as professional Lotto players. But just as regularly as the moon rose and set, the mamas of the dawn years came stepping through the high grass at dinner time with baskets of seeds, fruits, nuts and roots.

The seekers after noshable flora were led by Charlotte Clarke, a survival- and wild-food expert, who had no trouble pointing out something edible every few feet of the way into Cold Creek Canyon.

Even before she covered the few yards from the highway to the gate where the trail began, Clarke had pointed out five edible plants, from wild buckwheat to sage for flavoring barbecued meat. To the uneducated eye, they looked like weeds or common mountain greenery awaiting a brief moment of TV stardom in a brush fire.

The group--10 men, 11 women and 5 children--wound through a shady dell cooled by a clear stream. They climbed to upland meadows filled with the fragrance of wild roses and mustard (“throw the flowers in a blender with sour cream and it makes a nice chip dip for parties,” Clarke noted).

Picking wild food has its dangers, warned Clarke, author of “Edible and Useful Plants of California.” Take the wild tomato, or nightshade. Its European cousin is always preceded by the word deadly in British mystery novels in which the housekeeper polishes off the vicar by dosing his porridge.

“Actually, you can eat the California variety when they’re ripe,” she said, and she has enjoyed many a stewed nightshade. But eat them while still green, she cautioned, and you may learn too well why the vicar joined the choir eternal.

Fellow guide Brad Childs, from the Woodland Hills-based Wilderness Institute, which sponsored the walk, added a couple of cautions: (A) Don’t eat roadside plants that have absorbed a lot of auto exhaust pollution; and (B) you in the blue hat, that’s poison oak you’re walking into.

Clarke, who has a mass of fluffy blonde curls, delicate features and a high voice, is a botanist at Fullerton College in Orange County. When the hike ended, she was going to leave on her vacation, hiking through the Himalayas in Nepal.

Under the shade of a large oak, Clarke lectured on acorn cookery. She passed out Indian-style acorn cookies she had whipped up at home, flavored with mesquite pods, honey and pollen from cattails she spotted in a swamp near Newport. They weren’t bad, but the Indians clearly should have tried harder to locate the chocolate chip tree.

As the adults listened, 10-year-old Kelly Ford of Agoura ran an experiment of her own. She gathered some seeds and flower petals that Clarke had pointed out and gave them to 6-year-old Sam Horbund of Venice to sample.

“Yiiick!” said Sam, spitting them out, as short and direct a review as any food critic is likely to deliver.

By the midpoint of the hike, however, Sam was won over by Clarke’s elderberry jam sample.

“Other people go out to some restaurant for brunch on Mother’s Day. I go eat wild nettles,” said Christie Koepke, who has two daughters, one granddaughter, a doctorate in education, a husband named Charlie and 26 animals at her home in Arcadia.

She and Charlie, who teaches science at Upland Junior High School, wore straw Western hats. Charlie’s hat sprouted a spectacular decoration of feathers, Indian style.

“We like this kind of thing,” Koepke said. “I grow medicinal herbs in the yard and make a rheumatism oil I rub into Charlie.”

They acquired the menagerie because they nurse sick or injured animals, she said, including rabbits, crows, possums and other creatures. Charlie was particularly proud of the body work he did on a tortoise that had been run over by a dirt biker, which “left him all smooshed.”

“He couldn’t walk, but I fiberglassed his shell back together, and now the little sucker is running around real well.”

“This is my favorite way to spend a day,” said Sue Ford of Agoura, a ponytailed blonde who studies psychology at “a holistic college in Culver City.” She had come with daughter Kelly, sons Kevin, 12, and Danny, 6, and her husband, Craig, a dentist. “I don’t think I could survive out here yet, but we have an oak tree in our yard, and I’m going to try to make some of that acorn bread.”

“I always did wonder what those acorns the Indians are supposed to have lived on tasted like,” said Kathy Horbund, Sam’s mother. “They’re not bad.”

Her husband, Michael, a contractor with the physique of a grizzly in his prime, does all the cooking at their house, she said, for which he gathers some wild herbs. “Some of this stuff is very good--milkweed tops are delicious--but a lot of it is uuuuugh, strictly desperation time.”

“That’s OK,” Michael added.

“When all this is over, we’re going out for sushi.”