Exploring Uncommon Edible Plants: Adding Diversity to Your Garden

By Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp

President Hoover Rose )Public Domain)

Whether you call it an edible landscape, food scaping, stealth gardening, or veggies in pots, you
have many choices for how to incorporate food into your landscape. Even better, unusual or
uncommon edible plants add diversity to your garden and dinner table.
Many ornamental plants are edible, however, when eating anything from the landscape, you
want to make sure that the plants have not been treated with pesticides –– the last thing you
want to put in your body.
​
Several ornamental edible plants fall under the herb category; it’s just that we don’t always think
of them as herbs. Here are five uncommon edible plants that will keep all but the foodies
guessing.

Lavender (Lavandula spp.)

French lavender

Fragrance and a long bloom period are what make lavender a great plant for the garden and the
menu. Grow this woody perennial in full sun where the soil drains well and may even be a little
gravely. Lavender is drought-resistant, and butterflies, bees, and other pollinators love it.

​You’ll love it too when you add lavender flowers to ice cream (homemade even better), salads,
scones, shortbreads, teas, ice cubes, and more. Dried buds are potent – so potent that they
were used in mummification and health mixtures for all kinds of issues in the ancient past.
Lavender comes from the Latin verb lavare, meaning “to wash.”

One concern about using lavender in cooking is its intense flavor, which can make food have a
soapy taste. Although all lavenders are edible, some are grown for their strong fragrance and oils for soaps, sachets, and lotions. The best edible lavender is English lavender (Lavandula
angustifolia) because it has fewer oils.
 
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum minus)

Nasturtium flowers (Kurt Stüber) GFDL

The leaves and flowers of this annual add a peppery taste to salads. Rich in vitamin C and
antioxidants, nasturtiums are easy to grow in a pot from seed. You might be able to find
transplants of nasturtium in garden centers in the spring.
 
Grow nasturtium in a sunny to partly sunny spot and water during dry spells. Apply a plant
fertilizer according to label directions.

​Rose (Rosa spp.)

Yes, you can eat your roses. The petals from this shrub can be tossed in salads especially, but
also are used in baking shortbreads and scones. Rose hips (the seeds of roses) are common as
a tea.
Grow roses in full sun. Roses, especially the landscape types like Drift, Knock Out, and Flower
Carpet, do best when fertilized and watered regularly. Use a fertilizer formulated for roses, such
as Espoma Rose-tone, available at most garden centers and home improvement stores.
Remember to apply fertilizer at the base of the plant rather than all over. You don’t want to eat
plant fertilizer either, so be especially careful to keep it off the petals.
 
Serviceberry (Amelanchier spp.)

Serviceberry blossoms (Dietmar Rabich) CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the perfect plant for four seasons. A native tree, it can be grown as a multi-stem or
single-stem specimen. Serviceberry has slightly fragrant white flowers in spring, followed by
purple, blue, or pink fruit in June, tremendous red-orange fall color, and attractive silvery bark
that stands out in the winter landscape.

In the wild, serviceberry is an understory tree, found in shafts of light or on the fringes of
woodlands. The fruit is delicious, similar to blueberry. Use them in scones, mix with yogurt, or
toss in a salad. If you don’t eat the fruit, the birds will.
 
Wild violets (Viola spp.)

Wild violets (kitmasterbloke) CC BY 2.0 DEED

What’s prettier than violet flowers mixed with butter and jellies spread on freshly baked biscuits?
These perennial violets in the lawn or garden beds (some people call them weeds) are in the
same family as edible pansies and Johnny jump-ups.

​Violets are easy to grow in sun or shade. Some gardeners transplant them from the lawn to
flower beds where they work as a ground cover. If pulling from the lawn, be sure they have not
been treated with herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides.
 
If you’re worried about how to grow your edible garden without pesticides so you can safely eat
the plants, remember that there are plenty of beneficial insects –– even spiders –– that help
your garden grow. In addition to the pollinators, like bees, butterflies, flies, beetles, and birds,
your plants need other critters in order to thrive. So, skip the pesticides that will kill all the bugs,
and let nature work its magic.

Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp was the founding editor of Indiana Living Green magazine and she frequently talks on the topic of how to live a green life. She is an award-winning garden writer, editor, and speaker. Known as a hortiholic, she frequently says her eyes are too big for her yard. She blogs at hoosiergardener.com