A taste for blooms
Fancy getting your five-a-dahlia? Here’s how to grow and harvest edible flowers
A summer garden filled with fragrant blooms is a sight to behold and a scent to drink in. Less obvious, perhaps, is the sensory experience it can deliver to the tastebuds. For those delicate roses, peppery carnations and nutty sunflowers provide food for more than pollinators – they’re also delicious ingredients for the kitchen. Petals can be scattered like confetti, floated on top of cocktails or buried in buttercream.
This comes as no surprise to Jocelyn Cross, flower farmer and owner of Petite Ingredient in the Yarra Valley in Melbourne, Australia, though she admits her culinary experimention with florals hasn’t been a cut-and-dried experience: ‘It’s been a case of trial and error for me. I’ll see something online or in a book and think “That’s edible – I’ll give it a go”. I realised so many flowers tasted great: carnations like cloves, calendula like citrus, and coriander flower a more intense version of the foliage.’
Jocelyn has long been aware of the bounty provided by nature. As a child, she was taught to make the most of the produce around her family’s farm and was used to picking vegetables, foraging for blackberries and bringing edible flowers into the kitchen. This, in part, led to her decision in 2011 to begin growing and selling her own fragrant calendula, borage and violas. She started with a small 5x5m plot, but her edible flowers proved so popular that within 18 months she had moved to a commercial greenhouse. Today, she grows edible flowers in five acres of the Yarra Valley’s red volcanic soil, supplying more than 100 products to chefs and bakeries throughout Australia and further afield to Asia, America and Europe.
‘Borage was one of the first flowers I grew,’ says Jocelyn, who’s also co-author, with Mat Pember, of Root to Bloom: A Modern Guide to Whole Plant Use. ‘And I couldn’t believe this bright blue, star-shaped flower could taste so incredible. It was like oyster or cucumber – it was so yummy. I’ve always been passionate about flowers and loved arranging them in our family home growing up. I guess edible flowers are a natural progression and working with them is a bit like being an edible florist.’
Not everyone is fortunate to have a family that is knowledgeable about edible plant life, however. It can be a surprise to learn that blousy blooms, such as dahlias, nasturtium, fuchsia and rose, are good to eat. More than that, they’re good for you. In fact, palatable petals have been a much-valued ingredient for centuries. Early records show floral oils and tinctures being used for herbal medicine. The Romans added roses and lavender to dishes, medieval monks popped violas in syrups, and the Victorians made Parma violets famous.
‘In the 16th and 17th centuries, blossoms were used in cooking for all manner of dishes and credited for their medicinal and magical properties,’ says Jocelyn. ‘Many edible flowers were considered to have diuretic and cathartic properties, as well as being high in antioxidants and vitamins.’