— Excerpt from A Floral Feast: A guide to growing and cooking with edible flowers, foliage, herbs and seeds, by Carolyn Dunster.
There are many benefits to creating an edible flower garden. Firstly, I believe there is no question that flowers improve and enhance daily life, and there is nothing better than being able to pick a few blooms from outside your back door to use as a freshly picked garden-to-plate cooking ingredient.
There is plenty of evidence to show that regular contact with nature is essential to our well-being and growing your own flowers and/or vegetables or observing them up-close in the wild can be an act of kindness to yourself and a way of connecting with the wider world.
Growing your own flowers from seed is pure magic and the best form of therapy, requiring no technical intervention or any complicated instruction. All that’s needed are soil, light, water and patience (building reserves of the latter is no bad thing when instant gratification has become the norm).
Being outside and getting your hands into the earth releases feel-good endorphins that improve mood and cognitive function. There is also some early scientific research indicating that healthy soil bacteria (Mycobacterium vaccae) on the skin and under our fingernails can interact positively with our gut bacteria and boost the immune system.
The nurturing of plants is deeply rooted in our DNA – it’s what we have done for millennia to guarantee our survival. Our ancestors evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers and gardeners tending plots of land, essentially to feed themselves and their animals, and learning at the same time how to interact and work with the soil and the seasons. Over time, most of us have lost those skills but it is imperative for our own mental health and the overall future of the planet that we regain them.
Growing our own food gives us more control and helps to develop a stronger sense of agency over the way we can make a positive difference to our immediate surroundings. Despite a rural exodus during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is estimated that by 2050 80 percent of the population in the United Kingdom will be living in a town or city. The same is true for other industrialized countries, but as more people choose to live in urban areas, wild green spaces where nature is currently left to flourish unchecked are increasingly being lost to development.
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Growing your own flowers from seed is pure magic and the best form of therapy, requiring no technical intervention or any complicated instruction.
Make small changes
By making and tending gardens that are not too neat and manicured, letting go of the idea of a perfect but sterile green lawn and embracing ‘weeds’ (especially dandelions, which are delicious to eat), we can each make small changes that together have a much larger impact.
City streets change dramatically when they are lined with trees and front gardens are filled with shrubs and vibrant flowers. Not only are they visually more pleasing than uniform blocks of hard landscaping, but plants are vital to the environment: they clean the air by absorbing pollution, they help to mitigate against climate change by cooling down the atmosphere in hot weather and they provide natural defences against flooding during heavy rainfall.
Every garden, back yard and balcony packed with plants becomes more than the sum of its parts, providing important corridors for wildlife in towns and cities and ensuring a green legacy for future generations. Choosing to create an edible flower garden contributes hugely to this endeavour.
A lot of the plants that bear flowers suitable for eating have similar recognizable characteristics: they tend to bear brightly coloured, single-headed blooms with a long flowering period and many of them are strongly perfumed. These happen to be the kind of flowers that attract bees, butterflies, moths, ladybirds, hoverflies and other pollinating insects.
Eighty percent of flowering plants rely on insects for pollination, which is the transfer of pollen from one flower to the stigma, or female reproductive organs, of another, resulting in fertilization and the formation of seeds and, eventually, new plants. Vibrant perfumed blooms have evolved specifically to attract pollinators and many species of flowers and insects have developed mutualistic relationships to ensure their individual and joint survival. This is known as coevolution – one species cannot exist without the other – and many flowers have adapted a wide variety of shapes and sizes to reflect the anatomy and habits of their insect counterparts. Put simply, if one dies out so does the other.
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Layering your planting at different heights and allowing plants to intermingle with no obvious stops and starts provides a sense of continuity and this is also the best way to increase the biodiversity of your space.
Plant to help wildlife
By growing lots of different types of edible ornamental flowers or creating a small edible flower patch within a larger garden, your growing space will immediately become a focus for a wide range of insects, which is the first step to establishing a well-balanced mini ecosystem. In turn the insects will attract birds and small mammals, so your garden becomes energized, busy with the buzzing of pollinators, the rustling of life in the leaves and the sound of birdsong. By welcoming as much wildlife as possible you are encouraging nature to take care of itself and carry out its own form of pest management.
Gardening organically so that you can safely eat your homegrown flowers means no spraying with any kind of pesticides or chemicals, but the birds, beetles and ladybirds will helpfully deal with the aphids and slugs. To make a garden that is a welcome and safe place for wildlife and for people, there needs to be an underlying feeling of atmosphere or what is known as genius loci, commonly translated as ‘the spirit of place’. This means creating a garden where there is a sense of flow that exudes calm and where nothing jars or feels uncomfortable. Visitors will immediately relax. It is difficult to devise a precise design formula for this, but in essence it is all about the planting.
A green backdrop is crucial to blur the boundaries and create some seclusion unless you are surrounded by countryside. Growing plants in abundance provides a sense of generosity – encourage any prolific self-seeders to take the lead. If one type of flower performs particularly well, then repeat it in different hues so that you end up with fewer patches of bare soil and dense rich pockets of flowers to pick from.
Think about layers
Layering your planting at different heights and allowing plants to intermingle with no obvious stops and starts provides a sense of continuity. This is also the best way to increase the biodiversity of your space.
Start an upper storey with edible climbers for disguising walls and fences and, if you have room, plant a tree. A small fruit tree would be an obvious choice – all fruit blossoms can be eaten safely but you will also have the added advantage of enjoying the fruits later in the season if you don’t consume all the blossom flowers. You can also eat the foliage of trees such as an olive or fig. Toast fig leaves in the oven and crumble them over salads or use olive leaves fresh or dried to make a tea rich in antioxidants and vitamin C.
The next level down would be some shrubs. Choose evergreen and deciduous shrubs that produce edible flowers but also provide cover and shelter for crawling insects and small birds. Perfumed shrubs such as roses will also contribute to a strong sense of atmosphere. It’s possible to create an overlay of scent, particularly in a small garden, by combining different fragrant plants – the most useful when it comes to flavouring food – that have different growing habits and heights.
Finally, decide which flowers – a mix of bulbs, perennials and annuals – you really want to grow, thinking about their textures and shapes, their flowering times and any other characteristics. Do they need full sun or partial shade? How water dependent are they? Make a list or draw up a simple plan of your growing area.
To avoid expensive mistakes, work out which plants will thrive where before you begin and, when it comes to growing flowers for eating, choose the ones that seem most appealing in terms of taste. Whilst it is good to experiment there is no point growing fennel, for example, if you hate the taste of aniseed.
No-dig gardening
If you want to create an edible flower patch from scratch, then follow the no-dig method. Choose an area of flat ground – it could be part of a lawn – and cover it with thick brown cardboard in a square or rectangular shape. Recycled packaging boxes, with all tape removed, are perfect for this and will suppress any weeds or grass and act as a temporary base. They will gradually rot down over time.
Cover the cardboard with a 10cm (4in) layer of organic peat-free compost and wait for two weeks. If it doesn’t rain you will need to water the compost at least once to keep it moist. You can then plant directly into the compost – sow seeds or lay out plug plants in rows for easy access to picking, but it is important to state that a light touch is all that is required and there is no need to dig deep when creating new flower beds. Any turf or soil underneath the cardboard should remain undisturbed – this helps to retain the carbon stored underground rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.
Healthy soil equals healthy plants. Soil contains mycorrhizal fungi that make up an intricate and delicate network that joins with the roots of plants as a way of transferring water, carbon, nitrogen and all the other nutrients and minerals a plant requires to thrive. It is a natural ecosystem that can look after itself but if it is continually disturbed by too much digging or depleted by flooding, the fertility of your soil will suffer. You can help by using an organic mulch in the gaps between your plants that enriches the soil as it breaks down. There is no need to dig it in as the worms will gradually do this job and the same goes for leaving leaf litter, fallen twigs and the remains of spent annual flowers to decompose on the surface. They serve as food for the soil beneath that will, in turn, nourish next year’s flowers, making a perfect circle of sustainable and productive gardening practice with immediate benefits for now and for the future.
