The pantry in your garden

Discover a world of culinary excitement in your own garden with these delicious recipes using summer flowers, seeds and berries, from wild food expert Liz Knight

- Liz Knight

I grew up in a pebble-dashed house alongside the requisite crazy-paved patio. Rising from the broken concrete slabs were a number of dangerously nailed-together posts, which, if you were shortsighted, you might have called a pergola.

During the winter, the posts were only kept from tumbling to the ground by a gnarly climbing rose that somehow held the wooden structure together. Come early summer, the tangle of thorns transformed into a fragrant archway that dripped in plate-sized floribunda roses.

The roses may have been gaudy, but they smelt like something far more ethereal, delicious even - I desperately wanted to eat the apricot-pink flowers but had no idea that I could. Instead, I pushed the petals into bottles to make perfume, and pounded the flowers into a pulp which was then stirred into handfuls of the thick clay soil of our garden, making the most fragrant of mud pies.

Years later, when I discovered that roses were indeed food, I started growing my own roses to cook with, and as anyone who gardens will know, plants are addictive, so it wasn't long before my roses were interplanted with primroses, hostas and a little magnolia sapling. One by one I discovered that, like the roses around my parents' pergola, these plants and many of the others I squeezed into every inch of my garden were also edible. Not just edible, but delicious.

Over the years I've eaten my way around not just my garden, but the gardens of friends and neighbours, eating the flowers, leaves, seeds, even roots of plants most people consider to be ornamental. Even if you only have a balcony with a pot, many edible plants can be grown in limited spaces (even water lilies thrive in small ponds), turning the smallest spaces into a beautiful, edible garden.