blooming delicious

Neil Ross takes a closer look at some common edible flowers you might already be growing in your garden. Bon appétit! Eating anything from the garden always requires careful identification and a pinch of caution before you rush in and munch.

When the British plantswoman and author Beth Chatto died recently, I was reminded of the few times we had met over lunch way back when I was a horticultural student. While the hosts cooked, we were charged with cutting salad and Beth always insisted we take a ridiculously small basket out along with the heftier trug.

“It’s for the garnish,” she explained, deftly snipping off the heads of spring primroses and the piercing purple of tiny violets that cowered in the short grass below the cow barn.

Tinier still were the forget-me-nots nestling into the hedge bottoms and so popular with foraging bees that we had to brush them out of the way before stooping with fine pointed scissors.

In spring especially, salads can be a little drab so it was totally enchanting to me how these simple flowers turned a mound of chicory and rocket into a celebration of the season.

I am, in hindsight, thankful that Beth was such a gracious teacher, delighting in all the tiny details of the edible garden, and steering me clear of the buttercups and daffodils I’d been initially drawn to so nobody died on the day – always a positive.

If Beth was here today on the other side of the world, what might we be snipping for the Christmas table? Alongside a few well-known pickings, I’ve tried to include a few seasonal surprises which are safe to swallow.

And though I don’t find the taste many flowers to be that strong – pinks (dianthus) are said to be tinged with cloves and spice; chicory is certainly bitter; and calendula and nasturtium, peppery – the main reason I pick flowers to eat is purely for decoration and novelty, and just because I can.

Hibiscus blooms might be a surprise inclusion – so redolent of warm, hot New Zealand summers.

Friends of friends once generously invited me and my wife (then newly engaged) to stay at their Waiheke beach house. We sat out on the veranda on the first night,

lulled by the waves tumbling onto the sand lit by a full moon and the long candlelit table strewn with hibiscus as decoration. The hibiscus kept their ravishing ballgown shapes all evening without vases and they would do the same decorating a meal but I suspect would be just too hefty for the purpose.

Larger trumpet flowers such as these (hollyhock, gladioli and zucchini too) are perhaps better consumed as a starter in themselves – either deep fried in tempura or having their faces stuffed with cream cheese.

Daylillies (not to be confused with poisonous true lillies) can and should be used in the same way. The day I took daylily flowers to impress a school gardening club, you might have thought that I’d brought in a dinosaur egg and shown it hatching – so wide open were 20 amazed sets of eyes as we fried up the unopened buds looking like mini bananas and nibbled them tentatively. Eating a flower! The very act seemed (and still does) subversive – something so delicate and beautiful, scoffed in one sacrilegious gulp. Daylillies can upset the tummy in a few people but, thankfully again, everyone lived to tell the tale.

Eating anything from the garden always requires careful identification and a pinch of caution before you rush in and munch. Steer well clear of the delphiniums, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, poppies and deadly clematis. Make sure too that your chosen blooms are homegrown organically and not from some fume-ridden road verge or a supermarket where its growers may have been too free and easy with chemical sprays.

The vege garden is the place I really go to town scattering seeds of flowers easy on the eye and the stomach. Borage is a classic, pretty bloom used for encasing in ice cubes purely for looks. I dig in the spent plants as a green manure but why not pick runner bean blooms along with your beans and add them on the top after cooking? On the end of my bean rows I have space for a few sunflowers for gathering the edible petals and scrambling beneath in the shade, nasturtiums are planted in all their jewel-like colours. These are useful in the kitchen whether its seeds, leaves or those smiling faces strewn on a bowl of icecream or fruit salad. Smaller flowers such as pansies will always find a corner to reproduce and are still my favourite for decoration, being so elegant used whole, but your picking garden may also yield a bevy of edible petals be it dahlias, cornflowers or roses.

All these will keep for a few days in a container in the fridge, but why would you bother? The point of a floral garnish is surely its freshness and immediacy – that and the fun of sending your dinner guests out with a little basket to be touched by flowers, before gobbling them up whole.