There is a crafting/gathering area in all of the different zones in AOC and you can obtain your gathering quests in the villages that surround the port into these zones. From the wildlands you can run North along the road towards the outskirts and port to Poitain to locate your gathering quests. Poitain is a resource heavy zone where guild cities also reside (all guild cities reside in these crafting zones). Although Poitain and the other resource/crafting zones are resource loaded they are mostly higher level resources and not the ones you need for the first quests. You are better of finding those resources in the wildlands. 

Your first gathering quests require that you get 20 of each resource and you can get these quests at level 20. All resource nodes have a total amount of resource in them that can be harvested and they refresh preiodically, it will be rare if you ever find a completely full node. Once you have the first 20 you can turn in the quest and the next quest is for the rare versions of each resource. You have a low chance of receiving the rare versions of the resources when gathering regular resources.

Go gettem.