To use the surprisingly sweet petals, cut them away from the bitter white base of the flower. Type Annual Blooms Single, semidouble and double white, pink, lavender or red flowers with fringed petals in spring to summer Light Full sun Soil Average or moist, well-drained Size 3 to 24 in.
All roses are edible. Lucky for us, many of the old-fashioned heirloom roses are especially delicious. But when considering modern hybrid roses to eat, remember that only fragrant roses have flavorful petals. And, whatever the flavor, it is more pronounced in the darker varieties. The flavors vary but are all on the sweet side with overtones ranging from apple and strawberry to cinnamon and minty, depending on the rose.
Use miniature varieties to garnish ice cream and desserts or sprinkle larger petals on salads. Freeze rose petals in ice cubes and float them in punches. Petals can also be used in syrups, jellies, perfumed butters and sweet spreads. Just be sure to remove the bitter white portion of the petals before using them in a recipe.
Carefree Celebration above is a tall, upright shrub rose with great disease resistance and fragrance. The flavor of the pretty orange petals is slightly sweet. Type Shrub Blooms Beautiful, often fragrant, single, semidouble or double flowers borne singly or in clusters on often prickly stems in late spring to frost Light Full sun Soil Average or moist, well-drained Size 1 to 30 ft.
Pansies and their viola relatives like Johnny Jump Ups are the most popular edible flowers, perhaps because they come in such a wide array of colors. They are all edible and have a mild, slightly minty flavor or a more prominent wintergreen taste depending on the variety and how many you eat; an entire flower tastes stronger than just the petals alone. Yes, unlike many edible flowers, you can eat the entire pansy flower — sepals and all.
Pansies are popular eaten both fresh in salads and candied in desserts. Really, they work well as a garnish for any meal, savory or sweet.
Some pansies have a delicate fragrance, primarily the blue-flowered ones, which have a mild wintergreen flavor. Daylily blossoms are almost succulent and have a mildly sweet flavor, maybe a little like romaine lettuce. One of the tastiest is the common daylily, Hemerocallis fulva , sometimes called ditch lily because it has escaped gardens and naturalized along roadsides and ditches.
Be sure to sample the flavor of hybrid daylilies before harvesting a bunch for eating, as some daylilies taste better than others. Consider tossing a handful of colorful petals into your dinner salad. Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work in the garden. We may receive a commission from sales referred by our links; however, we have carefully selected these products for their usefulness and quality.
Best Planter Caddies for Healthier Plants. Edible Flowers By: James A. Baggett Edible flowers are a fun and easy way to add color and flavor to all sorts of dishes — especially when you pick them right from your own garden. Pick edible flowers at their peak freshness My enthusiasm for edible flowers only increased when I became friends with edible flower maven Cathy Wilkinson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate.
Know what your are eating! Make sure the flowers were grown chemical-free Eat only flowers that have been grown organically.
Avoid flowers affected by pollution Do not eat flowers picked from the side of the road. Start slowly when trying new edible flowers Introduce new flowers into your diet one at a time in small quantities.
Nasturtium Tropaeolum majus Nasturtiums are certainly the most well-known edible flowers. Marigold Tagetes spp. Strange as it may seem, walking into the yard and picking fresh violets and other edible flowers for a dinner salad with guests not only impressed my company but also helped make my house feel a lot more like a home. When I was a small child, I ate a significant portion of one of our hedge bushes, and my mom was quite concerned.
She always thought that bush smelled funny, and must be toxic. Angelica Flowers. Also known as cornflower, bachelors buttons are bright blue edible flowers with a mild grassy flavor. While the flower petals are a tasty edible, the green parts are much less pleasant. Carefully remove the green sepals around the flower to avoid their bitter taste. Bee Balm One of the most carefree flowers we grow, bee balm grows like a weed in our soils. Bee balm flowers are also medicinal, with antimicrobial and antispasmodic properties.
Beyond that, bee balm blossoms are also a nervine that calms the whole nervous system during periods of stress and anxiety. That makes them the perfect summertime addition to cool drinks when you have way too much on your busy summer schedule.
Pink Begonia Flowers. Generally, in my neighborhood, if there were carnations they were in an expensive floral arrangement rather than your home garden. Chamomile Best known as a simple relaxing herbal tea, chamomile can also be used to add a warm, sunny floral flavor to baked goods.
Edible chamomile flowers. Common Chickory Cichorium intybus is a perennial with beautiful blue flowers in mid-summer. The greens are an edible raw or cooked, and the root is used for flavoring in many commercial coffee blends.
Though the root is the best known edible part, the edible flowers make lovely additions to salads. Edible Flowers on a Chrysanthemum.
Most foragers know those wild daylilies are a special summertime treat, but that same treat that they hunt over hill and dale for in the countryside is likely growing in your suburban backyard. The unopened flower buds are commonly fried into daylily fritters or added to stir-fries.
Personally, I think the opened flowers taste the best and I love eating them whole. They have a honey-sweet crunch and a lovely floral taste. Every part of a daylily is edible, including the roots and young shoots.
Hunt Gather Cook has an excellent article on how to prepare each part. The blossoms taste a bit like cranberry, and they often stain foods bright red during cooking. Related to marshmallow flowers, hollyhocks are also edible flowers. Just like marshmallow, every part of the plant is edible. The leaves make a good fresh salad green, and all parts of the hollyhock plant can be used as a medicinal tea for pain and inflammation.
The same sugars that entice bees and hummingbirds are in the blossoms for us to eat as well, and that delightful scent comes through in the flavor of the flowers. Though we often think of garden hostas for their leaves, they also put out a profusion of blossoms mid-summer. The blossoms are edible and taste refreshing and mild. Beyond the edible flowers, the flower stalks, leaves, and young spring shoots are also edible. Young hosta shoots taste similar to asparagus and can be cooked in the same manner, or eaten raw in salads.
Later in the season, their edible flowers taste sweet and floral. They can be added to salads, eaten out of hand, or fried up into tasty fritters. A real treat for the nose and candy for the eyes, lilacs are also tasty to eat! Like many edible flowers, they taste an awful lot like they smell. One of the simplest ways to use them is making a simple lilac sugar.
There are a lot of creative ways to cook with lilacs, here are a few ideas to get you started:. While most edible flowers are found in the perennial garden, a few are found on trees.
Linden flower tea is medicinal and is often used by herbalists for treating anxiety and hyperactivity as well as ADHD in children. There are also some historical records that indicate that linden seed pods and flowers were once blended and used as a chocolate substitute in Europe. My favorite use thus far? A simple linden flower mead honey wine.
Beyond that, here are a few linden flower recipes to try:. Yes, marshmallows do grow right in the flower garden, or at least they used to. These days, commercial marshmallows are made from corn syrup and gelatin, but they used to be made from marshmallow and honey back in the middle ages. Every part of the marshmallow plant is edible, including the beautiful fragrant pink flowers. The leaves are a tasty spring green, and the roots are commonly used in medicinal preparations to soothe mucous membranes.
Marshmallows can also be made from the green seed pods after the edible flowers have been pollinated by local bees and the bees really love these flowers. If you want to try to make your own herbal marshmallows with just marshmallow plants and honey, there are detailed instructions in the book Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate.
Edible flowers on a common milkweed. Collecting peony petals as they fall, and not hurting your beautiful blooms, is a great way to get a second use out of a lovely midsummer flower. The petals can be lightly steamed and sweetened as they are in the east. Peonies can also be made into peony water or added to cool summertime beverages. Some time ago I remember reading that this is how they were consumed in Europe in the middle ages, but alas I can no longer find the source.
Beyond their edible flowers, peonies are used medicinally in China, where dried peony root is sold as Bai Shao. Women use peony for menstrual cramps, polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual syndrome PMS , and for starting menstruation or causing an abortion. Peony is also used for spasms, whooping cough pertussis , epilepsy, nerve pain neuralgia , migraine headache, and chronic fatigue syndrome CFS. You can also buy peony root glycerite for medicinal use. Not just edible, roses are delicious!
How do they taste you ask? Well, about how they smell. Fresh rose petals taste wonderfully floral, and you can add them to salads or eat them out of hand. I find that adding a bit of sugar makes a truly divine treat. I make a simple rose cordial from rose blossoms, sugar and a bit of citric acid for tartness. That simple rose cordial is great for flavoring all manner of things, and I use it to make rose soda for my daughter in the summer months.
It can also add rose flavor to more grown-up drinks. You can also buy rose hip tincture for that same purpose. Making Rose Cordial. With a sweet floral taste, violets are a lovely edible flower for topping salads. They bloom in the spring when linden trees are just starting to grow in their giant tasty leaves.
I love making a wild foraged salad with linden leaves as the green, topped with fresh violets. Edible flowers on a wild violet. Breast Milk Soap ». Comments Thank you! What an amazing post! LOVED this article!
So much information! Teriffic article, Ashley!! Thank you for taking the time! Treat cautiously and all of the above plants will really add to your environment, and your kitchen!
I was wondering if you would list your sources for the phlox, poppies and other types of daylilies as being poisonous.. I have also found sources of people who claim they are edible and have eaten them. To answer your queries separately :- Lillies The most common English names are flame lily, fire lily, gloriosa lily, glory lily, superb lily, climbing lily, and creeping lily.
All parts of the plant contain colchicine and related alkaloids and are therefore dangerously toxic if ingested, and contact with the stems and leaves can cause skin irritation. Some Lilium species are toxic to cats. This is known to be so especially for Lilium longiflorum though other Lilium and the unrelated Hemerocallis can also cause the same symptoms.
The true mechanism of toxicity is undetermined, but it involves damage to the renal tubular epithelium — composing the substance of the kidney and secreting, collecting, and conducting urine — which can cause acute renal failure.
However, I personally would avoid totally unless I was highly skilled at what I was preparing. Phlox subulata It is only this evergreen ground cover version of Phlox that is inedible. To my knowledge it is not toxic, but not digestible. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
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They can trigger both. Unless you know exactly which poppies are safe though, think they are best left in the garden.
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