Barbara Segall extols the delights and uses of edible flowers
Ihave been a reader of Amateur Gardening for many years and have written about gardens and plants at different times in its past. It is great to see it saved and re-invigorated by Kelsey Publishing and editor Kim Stoddart.
When I moved to my town garden 14 years ago I was determined that I would mainly grow plants that were ornamental as well as practical. To get their ‘resident’s pass’ plants have to perform and provide on many levels. In two of my herb books I have designed and grown sections of a garden using mainly plants with edible flowers.
There are many flowers that do double duty, offering garden ornament as well as colour and flavour in food. Eating flowers is not a new idea - flowers have been written about as ingredients and used in cookery for centuries. In recent years their use has seen a revival, with writers and growers including Jekka McVicar, Carolyn Dunster, Erin Bunting and Jo Facer devoting whole books to them.
Many of the flowers we grow in our gardens are just beautiful as they are and are the vibrant magnets and food sources for the vital pollinators that our fruit and veg gardens need. They may be part of a current food trend but I love using them for their looks and their flavours in salads, in baking, to flavour oils, sugar and vinegars, to decorate butter and soft cheeses and also to use in teas and steeped in alcohol to make drinks’ cupboard additions.
Familiar cottage garden and herb garden flowers
These are the simplest to grow in profusion for garden and kitchen use. Fragrant and aromatic plants offer the best flavour, and many of them come from the herb garden. Herbs with aromatic leaves such as rosemary, thyme, sage and lavender are safe to eat, but can have quite strong flavours. Rosemary, thyme, mint, chive, pot marigold and nasturtium all make well-coloured and aromatic ingredients, or in the case of chive, pot marigold and nasturtium, spicy additions to salads. I use nasturtium flowers as ‘wrappers’ for herbed soft cheese parcels. Purple basil and salad burnet flowers are useful to add colour and flavour to leafy green salads.
If you plan to grow flowers for the table there is one important rule to remember. Only eat flowers that you know to be edible. Never try out plants that you don’t know and never eat any flower that you cannot identify.
Roses and lavender, two of the most fragrant and evocative plants in the border, are used in many ways in cooking or flavouring food. I have eaten them straight from the garden or raw in various ways, but I feel they are too strong to eat just as they are.
The best roses for edible use are the highly fragrant roses classified in some catalogues as ‘old roses’. I add lavender and strongly scented rose petals to caste
