Grow-your-own ornamental edibles

Lee Senior says its surprising how so many plants can be both delicious and dramatic!

- Lee Senior

One of the joys of ‘growing your own’ is the sheer amount of different ways you can do it! Occasionally it can happen by accident, without us even realising it and sometimes in the most unexpected way.

The most obvious way humans grow their own food is by the deliberate and targeted choosing of the fruit and vegetables we enjoy. We choose the variety that we like to eat the most from the choices available and off we go cultivating our patch. These productive plants provide the mainstay and backbone of our smallholdings, vegetable gardens and allotments. So far so good, but nature is one step ahead and doesn’t categorize plants as humans do.

The purpose of plants ultimately in nature is to reproduce. To facilitate that process, flowers are usually (but not always) required. Sometimes those flowers are edible to humans and it may not always be the most obvious candidate!

For the purpose of this article, those plants are known as ‘edible ornamentals’.

Ornamentals in this context means something that is good to look at, and is aesthetically pleasing. The plant is normally grown for its appearance primarily and if some part of it just happens to be edible then, its happy days!

There are a surprisingly large number of flowering plants that are worthy of a place in an ornamental edible bed or garden. The location could be at home, on the allotment or on the smallholding or even in containers in miniature.

Ornamental edible flowering plants provide colour, shape and form as part of an overall design and they are often of benefit to wildlife as well as being tasty in the kitchen!

INTRODUCING A FEW ORNAMENTAL EDIBLES