In Texas, I had Dr. Mark Vorderbrugen (99.99872% sure I misspelled that) come to my farm. He’s in the Houston area. I’m not so much.
He’s also known as Meriwether’s Foraging Texas. A very good site. He’s the guy who wrote Foraging for Dummies.
Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that in my neck of the woods. I’ve taken classes from him at the Houston arboretum, as well.
Smilax roots are supposed to be useful but when I tried to make candy from them it didn’t set. We had Brier syrup instead lol

In woodlots or those odd corners you get in a bit of land that you never seem to cut or do anything with there might be some use in cultivating wild foods.

In the Pacific Northwest (where I am ) the local Indians appear to have maintained forest gardens, which would have supplemented the cultivation and harvest of camas lilly, wapato (sagitifolia latifolia) cattails and berries which grow in wetlands, or in the oak savanna that dominated on the valley floor.

In a study out of British Columbia a group surveyed pre-(European) settlement archeological sites and found that there wre groves that all had ten specific species that were important food and resource species for the Northwest Indians, two of which, Hazelnut and Pacific Crabapple, were outside of their natural range and an indication that the groves were planted or cultivated intentionally. The groves have been untended for over 100 years and appear to be stable (unless clear cut of course)

Unlike the Douglas fir or Hemlock forests, these forest gardens are made up of “edge” species, shorter shrubby plants which apparently are able to suppress the growth of the dominant conifers when established. They are also more supportive of wildlife, the B.C. study names deer, elk and moose as being more abundant in these gardens than in the surrounding forest. (Closed canopy forests in the Northwest can be pretty drab in the under-story and deer prefer to hang out in thickets)

You are in southern Alabama, so the plants you list are very different from what we have here, there are, however, also similar studies of the Amazon that find higher diversity of food type trees near archeological sites indicated by tera preta, earthworks and similar evidence of habitation. Pre-contact the Gulf coast was pretty densely populated, and I would be surprised if some similar forest cultivation would not have been going on. I suspect forest gardens are a standard way of food production where the staple crops were not full-sun dependent, like maize or wheat, or where the landscape was dominated by heavy forest.

I have been a fan of landscaping with native plants, and I love the food forest concept. These articles deal with the trees and shrubs but not the under-story plants which are also important food plants and are, here at least, stimulated by burning and by late summer grazing by cattle clearing the lowest competing shrubs and the grass. I guess that these types of plants would further increase the productivity of a forest garden.

I have the link to the B.C. study

**Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity** – Ecology & Society Journal

https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/