How to Grow and Use Edible Flowers

Plant edible flowers among the rows in the kitchen garden, and scatter them in the herb garden. They’re useful in attracting pollinators like bees to the other plants, ornamental in a kitchen garden design – and also delicious.

When guests come for dinner, bring them out to the garden to pick their own salads. Sometimes they’re amazed that, yes, they can eat the flowers, and yes, some flowers are really quite tasty. Even when all they add to a plate is color, edible flowers add elegance to a meal.

Of course, there are rules about eating flowers. Not all flowers are edible (some are quite toxic, in fact) and even those that are edible must have been grown without pesticides and the chemicals that are often used on conventionally raised ‚”ornamental” flowers. That’s why it’s a good idea to grow edible flowers in vegetable and herb gardens, where they have the same growing conditions as the other food plants.

Many Flowers can be Eaten

Common edible flowers include nasturtiums, pansies, calendula, roses, and the flowers of many herbs, such as chives. Squash blossoms are traditionally used in Mediterranean cuisine, and are delicious stuffed with cheese and sautéed. If you are not 100 percent certain that a flower variety is edible, don’t use it until you’ve asked a reputable horticultural expert. (The master gardeners who staff the Hotlines at the regional Cornell Cooperative Extension offices are a good resource.)

Cathy Wilkinson Barash has written a definitive book on the subject: Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate (1993 Fulcrum Publishing). Barash recommends dipping entire young dandelions in egg and then cornmeal, then frying them. ‚”It’s amazing how this turns the slightly bitter flower into the flavor of a mushroom,” she says.

Roses are Edible and Beautiful

Roses are the queens of edible flowers, and rose bushes can be planted around vegetable gardens specifically for use in the kitchen. Although older varieties have more fragrant flowers and produce hips, virtually any fragrant rose is edible, providing it has been grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers (which should not be used on any plant meant to be eaten).

Use your sense of smell and taste to see if a certain variety of rose would be good on the plate; even the same varieties grown in different gardens can vary in what they can offer the cook.

Writer Ellen Spector Platt offers the following tips for using edible roses in her book, Beyond the Garden: Easy and Elegant Rose Design (2004 Fulcrum Publishing).

• Cut off the bottom white portion of the petal before using them in recipes, or sprinkling them on desserts. The white part is usually bitter.
• Sprinkle rose petals in wine coolers and fruit punch, and on salads, including fruit salads.
• Mix red rose petals into herbal butters to improve their appearance and add an unusual flavor note.

Spector Platt recommends planting Rosa rugosa or Rosa canina for large hips that are high in Vitamin C. R. Rugosa ‘Delicata’, a variety introduced in 1898, has especially large hips as does Rosa damascena Trigintipetala ‘Damask’, introduced before 1850.

Herbalist and author Jim Long first began using roses in salads as a teen-ager and has traveled the world to study how other cultures use roses in their cuisine. His travels inspired his book, How to Eat a Rose: Simply Delicious Recipes for Eating Roses (LongCreekHerbs). “In areas of the world where civilizations have thrived for millennia, roses are used for flavoring much like we in the West use vanilla or cinnamon,” he says. ‚”Rose ice cream is a common flavor in Asian countries. Rose drinks are a regular cooling summer drink in desert areas and rose water splashed on the forehead to cool the face is as common in some cultures as a cologne or after shave lotion is to ours.”