Edible flowers can be found in all sorts of landscape situations. Chestnut roses (left) grace a front yard in Jackson, Mississippi. Nasturtiums (above, top) cascade out of a planter and complement the Spanish architecture in a California garden. In New Jersey, many varieties of scented geraniums (above, bottom) line a walk at Well-Sweep Herb Farm.
how to grow edible flowers
All sorts of plants produce edible flowers, but it's the annual flowers—those that are seeded, grown, and produce all in just one season, like nasturtiums, pansies, and squash blossoms—that people are most familiar with. The easiest way to obtain edible flowers is to inventory the plants already growing in your garden.
First, peruse the Encyclopedia of Edible Flowers (page 29) to see which plants produce edible flowers; then walk around your property to see which ones you have. Be sure to check out your vegetable garden too, as some of those plants produce great flowers. Then, before you go any further, get acquainted with the accompanying poisonous plant list (pages 14-15). To make sure you properly identify the flowers, please obtain a couple of basic field guides to edible plants (see the Bibliography, page 104). And just to be safe, you might take a sample of whatever you are considering eating to a local nursery for a positive identification.
Once you have inventoried your landscape for flowering "delicacies," consider adding a few choice perennials, bulbs, shrubs, or trees. Daylilies, tulips, roses, and apple blossoms, for example, all have edible flowers. Because they grow for years—perennially—such plants need a permanent site; consider carefully where to locate them.
Perennials are generally planted from divisions or from grafted plant material, depending on the species, and they need good soil preparation and drainage, though they are usually not as fussy about soil fertility and moisture as annual flowers and vegetables are. For more information on planting perennials, see Appendix A, "Planting and Maintenance" (page 92).
My back patio edible flower garden (right) was designed with pink in mind. The flowers are a combination of annuals and perennials. A miniature pink rose sits in a container, and the perennial Alpine strawberries, English daisies, pinks, and day lilies fill in most of the bed. I supplement the beds with pansies in the spring and chrysanthemums in the fall.
Most of the plants that produce edible flowers need at least six hours of sun each day. Add perennial edible flowers to your landscape easily by installing a border of lavender plants along a driveway; putting in a small sitting area surrounded by daylilies and chrysanthemums; adding a little herb corner off the patio planted with sage, chives, fennel, and bee balm; or planting more than your usual number of tulips in the fall. If you're feeling a little more ambitious, plant a redbud or apple tree to give you privacy from a neighbor's window. Maybe you've always wanted a lilac; now you have one more excuse to plant one. By adding just a few plants here and there, you can add quite a bit to your repertoire in the kitchen.
Carole Saville (top) helps plant my nasturtium garden. One year, I planted a whole garden of nasturtiums (below) and trialed a dozen varieties. Here, Jody Main and Adam Lane harvest handfuls of blooms from that garden. The nasturtiums all tasted the same, but the color variations were fantastic.
All herb flowers (above) are edible. Consequently, an herb garden is a great place to find more flowers for your salad. Here, my streetside herb border contains nepitella (Italian mint), lavender, and lemon thyme, all herbs that produce flowers. Not all herbs bloom, however. Included in the bed are variegated oregano and sage, which never produce flowers. For a larger selection of edible flowers, I added blue and yellow violas and pansies to the herb planting.
The Encyclopedia of Edible Flowers (page 29) details which varieties produce the best edible flowers and provides information on growing all the plants mentioned—enough to get you started and give you an idea of how much care the plants need. Occasionally you may need to consult other books for different information—local cultivars or conditions, for example. Be aware that the authors of most of the flower-culture books in this country do not anticipate your eating the flowers and therefore occasionally recommend pesticides that are unsafe for human consumption. (Nontoxic, organic pest and disease controls are given in Appendix B, Pest and Disease Control, page 99.)
Unlike vegetable varieties, the flowers bred at nurseries have been selected not for their flavor but for their appearance and growing ease. Therefore, taste as many varieties as possible before you plant. Visit the gardens of friends and neighbors and taste a few flowers at a time. But beware of poisons! Before you start tasting flowers, let alone planning your garden, you need a brief lesson on poisonous plants.
Poisonous Plants
What is poisonous, anyway? When I began my research I was naive enough to assume that I would be able to find a definitive list of poisonous flowering plants. No such luck. There are plenty of lists of poisonous plants, but none that completely resolves the issue of what is and is not poisonous. I had to do my own legwork, so I began at the beginning, with Webster's Third: poison: "A substance... that in suitable quantities has properties harmful or fatal to an organism when it is brought into contact with or absorbed by the organism."
So the two crucial factors are chemical contents and dosage. As to the former, plants containing alkaloids, glyco-sides, resins, alcohols, phenols, and oxalates are potentially poisonous, but their toxicity depends on the amount of these substances they contain. After all, many poisonous plants are also valuable medicines; it is the dosage that determines whether the end product is medicinal or toxic. In fact, some poisonous-plant lists actually include spinach and chard because they contain oxalic acid, which is poisonous in large quantities.
Still, determining how much of a substance makes a plant or serving toxic is a matter for chemists. Obviously, the more you ingest—eating foxglove ice cream rather than just a single petal on a salad plate—the greater the hazard. My advice and the rule I follow is, Don't take chances. If a flowering plant is on any list of poisonous plants, I don't eat it—not even a single petal—until I have more information. And if I can't find the plant on any list of edible or poisonous plants, I assume it is not edible.
Here are some guidelines I have gathered from food technologists and environmental botanists:
1. Positively identify the plant—Latin name and all. As with mushrooms, identification is crucial.
2. Birds and animals are unharmed by some plants that are poisonous to humans. The gray squirrel can safely eat the deadly amanita mushroom, and birds regularly gorge on the irritating red elderberry berries. So don't depend on guinea pigs of any species to guide you.
3. Not all parts of toxic plants are necessarily poisonous. For instance, rhubarb stalks and potatoes are edible, but the leaves of both plants are poisonous.
4. Some plants,
