Читать книгу The Edible Flower Garden - Rosalind Creasy - Страница 6

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It's incredible how many flowers or parts of flowers I've eaten in the past few years—lavender petals made into ice cream, zucchini blossoms stuffed with ricotta cheese, roses used in butter, to name just a few. And I've made an effort to share the experience, serving unsuspecting guests unadorned pineapple guava petals and an Art Deco—style cake with candied pansies. Not only do I eat edible flowers, but I've become a missionary in promoting them!

I'd love to be able to tell you about the first flower I ever ate, but I can't remember what it was. It was probably a nasturtium, though, eaten nearly twenty years ago. I'm certain I started slowly, since to eat flowers seemed odd to me, maybe even taboo. I remember eating rice garnished with calendula petals in Vermont and thinking that they made the dish colorful but didn't add much to the flavor. Later I tried a few pansy petals served in a restaurant salad and still wasn't won over. It wasn't until I tasted lavender ice cream at an herb seminar that I became really enthusiastic. It was fantastic! I determined there and then to learn more about edible flowers.

Edible flowers can be tucked into almost any garden scene. Here (left), pansies, roses, and chrysanthemums grow in my back garden. A bouquet of edible flowers (above) includes calendulas, scarlet runner beans, lavender, nasturtiums, and chive blossoms. The photo spread on pages 2 and 3 shows a sunny border designed for a client. I interspersed the edible roses, nasturtiums, and marigolds among the nonedible lantanas and plumbagos. I used their blue and lavender blooms to tone down the fiery reds and oranges.

Since that time I've probably asked everyone I know to eat flowers. A few people just plunge right in with delight, as if I've given them permission to enjoy a new pleasure. But most people are much more hesitant. One friend would accept my dinner invitation only after warning, "But I won't try any of your darn flowers!" You'd have thought I was offering her fried caterpillars. I've tried to get people to explain their hesitation about eating flowers, but they seem to have a hard time doing so. I certainly have difficulty explaining my initial reluctance. Why do others? Is it because we hesitate to try any new food? Somewhat. Is it a concern about the safety of eating them? Maybe. But I've just about concluded that, mainly, people believe that flowers are almost magical, so beautiful that only the eyes should feast on them. To those folks, eating flowers seems a bit greedy.

I've read everything I could find about edible flowers. I've asked every chef I've interviewed about his or her experiences with them. And I've tasted, tasted, and tasted every edible flower I could get my hands on, even stooping on occasion to sneak a bite of my hostess's centerpiece.

I've found the information available on edible flowers to be a strange hodgepodge. Much of our knowledge about edible flowers comes from old herbals. But when I turned to the herbals themselves, my confusion mounted. Eating flowers was commonplace in medieval Europe, when food often had a medicinal as well as a nutritional purpose. Sometimes the old recipes included dangerous flowers. Thus, a dish might call for two or three blossoms of foxglove, which is classified as poisonous today. True, we use foxglove to make digitalis, a heart stimulant, but only in carefully measured doses. I realized, as I read the old recipes, that the term poisonous is relative.

Displays of edible flowers (right) at farmer's market and exhibitions such as this one at the Tasting of Summer Produce in Oakland, California, get more sophisticated every year. On display are fuchsias, Johnny-jump-ups, tuberous begonias, nasturtiums, and rose petals. Flower petal confetti (far right) is a versatile little pleasure. Prior to serving, it can be sprinkled over an entree plate, a salad, or pastries.

As if the herbals' folk-medicine approach didn't make it difficult enough to determine which flowers are safe to eat, our forebears often called flowers by different names. For instance, what we know as calendula they called marigold; what we call cottage pink was gillyflower. So I was faced with the challenge of making sure the flowers referred to in the recipes matched the flowers we grow today.

And then which of the edible flowers are palatable? I collected a number of modern lists of edible flowers and cautiously began my taste testing. Some were absolutely horrible! Obviously, no one had tasted them before adding them to the lists. For example, some marigolds have a slightly lemony taste, others are tasteless, but the taste of most falls somewhere between skunk and quinine. Furthermore, none of these lists gave much guidance on how to eat the different kinds of flowers. I remember innocently putting an entire mullein petal into my mouth and finding it to be horribly astringent. I had the same experience with a carnation petal. Later I learned that you need to first remove the terrible-tasting white part at the base of the petals.

Flowers should become a permanent part of our cuisine. They offer another alternative to salt and sugar as seasonings. Not only do flowers make interesting seasonings, especially for those fruits and vegetables we want to increase in our diets, but their aesthetic value as decoration is obvious.

In researching this book, I asked every gardener, chef, and food expert I could talk to how they prepared edible flowers. And I arranged for a few edible flower gardens to be grown for this project: one by Carole Saville, an herb specialist in Los Angeles; another by the folks at the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California; not to mention my own little edible flower gardens.

This harvest of edible flowers (left) is held by Judy Dornstroek. She and her husband grow edible flowers in their Pennsylvania greenhouse to sell to restaurants. Included are pink rose-scented geraniums, borage flowers, and nasturtiums of many colors. A harvest from my garden (below, top) includes broccoli and mustard blossoms, violas, violets, Johnny-jump-ups, the tiny mache flowers, calendulas, and nasturtiums. Edible flowers also can be used in bouquets. Here is a striking orange and blue bouquet from my garden (below, bottom) with lots of nasturtiums and the nonedible bachelor buttons.

If you're still hesitant about jumping in and growing an edible flower garden, I urge you to read along for inspiration. I bet that by the time you finish the cooking section, the sheer anticipation of working with flowers in your kitchen will have you planning your edible flower garden.

Edible flowers can be found in all sorts of landscape situations. Chestnut roses (left) grace a front yard in Jackson, Mississippi. Nasturtiums (above, top) cascade out of a planter and complement the Spanish architecture in a California garden. In New Jersey, many varieties of scented geraniums (above, bottom) line a walk at Well-Sweep Herb Farm.

how to grow edible flowers

All sorts of plants produce edible flowers, but it's the annual flowers—those that are seeded, grown, and produce all in just one season, like nasturtiums, pansies, and squash blossoms—that people are most familiar with. The easiest way to obtain edible flowers is to inventory the plants already growing in your garden.

First, peruse the Encyclopedia of Edible Flowers (page 29) to see which plants produce edible flowers; then walk around your property to see which ones you have. Be sure to check out your vegetable garden too, as some of those plants produce great flowers. Then, before you go any further, get acquainted with the accompanying poisonous plant list (pages 14-15). To make sure you properly identify the flowers, please obtain a couple of basic field guides to edible plants (see the Bibliography, page 104). And just to be safe, you might take a sample of whatever you are considering eating to a local nursery for a positive identification.

Once you have inventoried your landscape for flowering "delicacies," consider adding a few choice perennials, bulbs, shrubs, or trees. Daylilies, tulips, roses, and apple blossoms, for example, all have edible flowers. Because they grow for years—perennially—such plants need a permanent site; consider carefully where to locate them.

Perennials are generally planted from divisions or from grafted plant material, depending on the species, and they need good soil preparation and drainage, though they are usually not as fussy about soil fertility and moisture as annual flowers and vegetables are. For more information on planting perennials, see Appendix A, "Planting and Maintenance" (page 92).

My back patio edible flower garden (right) was designed with pink in mind. The flowers are a combination of annuals and perennials. A miniature pink rose sits in a container, and the perennial Alpine strawberries, English daisies, pinks, and day lilies fill in most of the bed. I supplement the beds with pansies in the spring and chrysanthemums in the fall.

Most of the plants that produce edible flowers need at least six hours of sun each day. Add perennial edible flowers to your landscape easily by installing a border of lavender plants along a driveway; putting in a small sitting area surrounded by daylilies and chrysanthemums; adding a little herb corner off the patio planted with sage, chives, fennel, and bee balm; or planting more than your usual number of tulips in the fall. If you're feeling a little more ambitious, plant a redbud or apple tree to give you privacy from a neighbor's window. Maybe you've always wanted a lilac; now you have one more excuse to plant one. By adding just a few plants here and there, you can add quite a bit to your repertoire in the kitchen.

Carole Saville (top) helps plant my nasturtium garden. One year, I planted a whole garden of nasturtiums (below) and trialed a dozen varieties. Here, Jody Main and Adam Lane harvest handfuls of blooms from that garden. The nasturtiums all tasted the same, but the color variations were fantastic.

All herb flowers (above) are edible. Consequently, an herb garden is a great place to find more flowers for your salad. Here, my streetside herb border contains nepitella (Italian mint), lavender, and lemon thyme, all herbs that produce flowers. Not all herbs bloom, however. Included in the bed are variegated oregano and sage, which never produce flowers. For a larger selection of edible flowers, I added blue and yellow violas and pansies to the herb planting.

The Encyclopedia of Edible Flowers (page 29) details which varieties produce the best edible flowers and provides information on growing all the plants mentioned—enough to get you started and give you an idea of how much care the plants need. Occasionally you may need to consult other books for different information—local cultivars or conditions, for example. Be aware that the authors of most of the flower-culture books in this country do not anticipate your eating the flowers and therefore occasionally recommend pesticides that are unsafe for human consumption. (Nontoxic, organic pest and disease controls are given in Appendix B, Pest and Disease Control, page 99.)

Unlike vegetable varieties, the flowers bred at nurseries have been selected not for their flavor but for their appearance and growing ease. Therefore, taste as many varieties as possible before you plant. Visit the gardens of friends and neighbors and taste a few flowers at a time. But beware of poisons! Before you start tasting flowers, let alone planning your garden, you need a brief lesson on poisonous plants.

Poisonous Plants

What is poisonous, anyway? When I began my research I was naive enough to assume that I would be able to find a definitive list of poisonous flowering plants. No such luck. There are plenty of lists of poisonous plants, but none that completely resolves the issue of what is and is not poisonous. I had to do my own legwork, so I began at the beginning, with Webster's Third: poison: "A substance... that in suitable quantities has properties harmful or fatal to an organism when it is brought into contact with or absorbed by the organism."

So the two crucial factors are chemical contents and dosage. As to the former, plants containing alkaloids, glyco-sides, resins, alcohols, phenols, and oxalates are potentially poisonous, but their toxicity depends on the amount of these substances they contain. After all, many poisonous plants are also valuable medicines; it is the dosage that determines whether the end product is medicinal or toxic. In fact, some poisonous-plant lists actually include spinach and chard because they contain oxalic acid, which is poisonous in large quantities.

Still, determining how much of a substance makes a plant or serving toxic is a matter for chemists. Obviously, the more you ingest—eating foxglove ice cream rather than just a single petal on a salad plate—the greater the hazard. My advice and the rule I follow is, Don't take chances. If a flowering plant is on any list of poisonous plants, I don't eat it—not even a single petal—until I have more information. And if I can't find the plant on any list of edible or poisonous plants, I assume it is not edible.

Here are some guidelines I have gathered from food technologists and environmental botanists:

1. Positively identify the plant—Latin name and all. As with mushrooms, identification is crucial.

2. Birds and animals are unharmed by some plants that are poisonous to humans. The gray squirrel can safely eat the deadly amanita mushroom, and birds regularly gorge on the irritating red elderberry berries. So don't depend on guinea pigs of any species to guide you.

3. Not all parts of toxic plants are necessarily poisonous. For instance, rhubarb stalks and potatoes are edible, but the leaves of both plants are poisonous.

4. Some plants, such as pokeweed, are poisonous only at certain times of the year.

5. Because individuals can be allergic to substances that are not generally poisonous—wheat and milk, for example—when you first taste a new food, eat only a small amount.

6. Just because most members of a particular plant family are not poisonous does not mean that all are.

7. Heating or cooking in water removes many toxins, but not all.

8. Never use any flower as a garnish if it's not edible. In this day and age, when diners eat flowers, you're just asking for an accidental poisoning.

9. Make sure it's clear to children that some flowers are edible and others can make them sick.

10. And a most important point: You can cause damage and not even know it. Because a plant does not make you sick to your stomach or cause your heart to race or make you break out in a rash doesn't mean that it's safe. Some toxic reactions take time to manifest themselves; others will never be detected. For example, some plants contain chemicals that cause cancer, abortions, or birth defects; others are filled with chemicals that raise your blood pressure, rob the body of calcium, or tie up iron.

Most landscapes contain both edible and nonedible flowers. It's important for children in particular to be taught the difference. Here, edible roses, society garlic, and nasturtiums grow among the nonedible coreopsis and iris.

Below is a list of a few of the most common poisonous plants and the parts of the plants known to be dangerous.

Amaryllis Hippeastrum puniceum: Bulb

Anemone Anemone tuberosa and other spp: All

Autumn Crocus Colchicum autumnale: All

Azalea Rhododendron spp.: All

Belladonna Lily (Naked Lady) Amaryllis belladonna: Bulb

Bird-of-Paradise Strelitzia reginae: Seeds and pods

Buckeye (Horse Chestnut) Aesculus arguta and A. hippocastanum and other spp.: Seeds, flowers, and leaves

Buttercup Ranunculus spp.: All

Caladium Caladium bicolor and other spp.: All

Cardinal Flower Lobelia cardinalis: Particularly the bulb

Clematis Clematis: All

Daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus: Particularly the bulb

Datura Datura mete hides: All

Delphinium Delphinium spp.: All

Foxglove Digitalis purpurea: All

Gloriosa Lily Gloriosa spp.: All

Hydrangea Hydrangea spp.: All

Iris Iris spp.: Leaves and rootstock

Jessamine Gelsemium sempervirens: All

Lantana Lantana spp.: All

Larkspur Delphinium spp.: All

Lily-of-the-Valley Convallaria majalis: All

Lupine Lupinus spp.: All

Monkshood Aconitum spp.: All

Narcissus Narcissus spp.: All

Oleander Nerium oleander: All

Poinsettia Euphorbia pulcherrima: All

Rhododendron Rhododendron spp.: All

Star-of-Bethlehem Ornithogalum spp.: All

Sweet Pea Lathyrus spp.: All

Tansy Tanacetum vulgare: All

Wisteria Wisteria floribunda and W. sinensis: Pods and seeds

my edible flower gardens

I always have edible flowers growing in my yard. Some (lavender, daylilies, and anise hyssop) grow in ornamental flower borders, others (rosemary and thyme) are part of my herb corner, and still others (squash and broccoli) grow in the vegetable garden. Sometimes, though, just for fun I like to try new edible flower varieties or illustrate how little room it takes to grow a selection of flowers for the kitchen, so I grow tiny gardens of only edible flowers.

It never stops amazing me how little space it takes to grow an enormous number and variety of blossoms for the table. The garden illustrated on pages 18-19 was located in my front-yard vegetable garden and included eleven species of edible flowers—enough to make a huge impact in the kitchen. I chose yellow, orange, and blue flowers. The total area of this little flower garden was six feet by twelve feet with a two-foot-wide path running through the middle, or about sixty square feet of bed space. As it turned out, half that size would have been plenty.

I live in a mild-winter area, so I planted my garden in early fall. Gardeners in USD A Zones 1 through 8 would plant this type of garden in the spring, starting many of the plants in flats six weeks before the average last frost date. I planted the mizuna, arugula, nasturtiums, and calendulas directly in the garden from seeds. The rest of the plants came from a nursery.

My front walk (right) is festooned with edible flowers, including roses, winter savory, society garlic, the species marigolds 'Lemon Gem,' and 'Empress of India' nasturtiums.

My soil is in enviable condition after twenty years of soil building, so I didn't need to add amendments at planting time. First, I laid out the beds. Because they are the tallest, I filled the back row of one bed with arugula and mizuna, a Japanese-type mustard. The middle row contained nasturtiums and calendulas, which grow to about eighteen inches. In the front row I planted the shorter pansies, violas, Johnny-jump-ups, and chives. In another bed I included strawberries, pansies, English daisies, and tulips as well as half a dozen heads of romaine and frilly red lettuces and a cluster of bunching onions—all great for salads. I could have included cilantro, fennel, radishes, bush peas, broccoli, and many more types of mustard, but I planted them in the vegetable garden that year because I like to rotate crops.

One year, I took the middle two beds out of my vegetable garden and planted them primarily with annual edible flowers. In spring, these little plots produced enough flowers to decorate a panoply of fancy platters. The drawing (above) indicates the location of the plants. In the back row, the north side of the garden (to the left), I planted the tallest plants so they would not shade the shorter species. The back row contains (top to bottom) arugula and mizuna (a Japanese mustard). The next row contains yellow nasturtiums and a chive plant, orange calendulas, and red and orange nasturtiums. The front row contains yellow and lavender violas and 'Antique' mix pansies. Across the path (top to bottom), are romaine lettuces, yellow violas, white English daisies, Alpine strawberries, and the red lettuce 'Lolla Rossa.' In the middle is a cluster of tulips, and the front row was planted with bunching onions, purple violas, and more English daisies.

Over the years I have noticed that the cool-weather edible flowers are the savory ones that are great for salads, appetizers, and garnishes for winter and spring meals. The sweet flowers on roses, lavender, honeysuckle, and scented geraniums all bloom in warm weather. That winter I was able to harvest pansies, violas, Johnny-jumpups, and calendulas—all great for salads and garnishes—from early winter through late spring. Our frosts knocked out my nasturtiums, so I replanted them in early spring. Soon the tulips, English daisies, mizuna, and the arugula came into their glory. I could now make an even greater range of appetizers and butters and fancier salads. In the middle of spring the nasturtiums kicked in and the strawberries started to flower (and kept going through the summer). In late spring the chives came into bloom, the English daisies were starting to dwindle, and the mizuna went to seed and were pulled out. A few weeks later I needed to pull out most of the plants in order to plant summer vegetables. If I had the space to allow most of the edible flower plants to go to seed (as I do some years), the nasturtiums, arugula, Johnny-jump-ups, calendulas, and mizuna would have reseeded themselves and the next fall very little planting would have been needed to renew the beds (the strawberries, chives, and English daisies are perennials).

My little annual edible flower garden (left) in early spring produced tulips, violas, mustard flowers, and a few English daisies. A few weeks later, the same garden was in full swing (above) and the violas and nasturtiums were exuberant, growing in among each other, as were the chives, pansies, and calendulas.

I planted another edible flower garden off my back patio (see page 11). It had a completely different color scheme: burgundy pansies, pink dianthus, light yellow 'Stella de Oro' dwarf daylilies, primrose yellow nasturtiums, Alpine strawberries, baby-pink roses, and variegated society garlic. Probably the most dramatic and fun edible flower garden I ever created was one planted with only nasturtiums—ten different varieties, to be exact (see page 12). It was eye-opening to see how many different varieties there were. Some were double, others were bicolored, and still others had green and white foliage. Of course, it produced a "gazillion" nasturtiums, and everyone who visited left with a big enough bouquet to cook with for a week.

Many edible flowers will reseed themselves like crazy. This little corner of my garden (below) grows by itself. Every spring it is completely filled with Johnny-jump-ups, nasturtiums, mache, and watercress with its edible lacy white blossoms shown on the right.

The Chez Panisse Flower Garden

A number of years ago I invited Andrea Crawford, then manager of the Chez Panisse restaurant garden in Berkeley, California, to join me in an experiment: growing a prototypical edible flower garden with which the chefs could experiment. She and Alice Waters, the executive chef of Chez Panisse, had been growing and serving edible flowers for years and were eager to learn even more. In this garden we grew flowers that none of us had ever used in the kitchen before.

To begin, we looked over my list of edible flowers, perused seed catalogs for unusual varieties, and ordered a good selection. Both Andrea and I gathered information from everyone we knew who had grown our selections. Jan Blum, of Seeds Blum, sent us 'Fragrance' dianthus seeds; Renee Shepherd, of Renee's Garden, sent us 'Kablouna' calendula, anise hyssop, and 'Whirlybird' nasturtium seeds; and we both raided our own supplies of seeds and plants. We concentrated mainly on annual flowers because we wanted to evaluate the flowers in the kitchen within a year and because they are easiest for most gardeners to obtain. Andrea had been producing borage, Johnny-jump-ups, lavender, climbing nasturtiums, violas, mustard, radishes, chicory, scented geraniums, and herbs for the restaurant, and she chose varieties from among her favorites. For years I had been growing scarlet runner beans, English daisies, and marigolds, but I had never tasted their flowers and was curious about them, so I chose the most promising varieties. I also selected 'Empress of India' and 'Alaska' nasturtiums, two particular varieties I had never used in the kitchen.

Summertime temperatures in Berkeley are moderated by morning fog, and few days exceed 90°F. The winters are mild, with temperatures seldom dropping below freezing. Though you might be hesitant at first about trying to duplicate much of this garden if you live in a northern region, almost all the flowers can actually be grown equally well anywhere in the country. The soil in the Berkeley garden was clay with a tremendous amount of organic matter added. The beds were in wonderful shape after years of loving care. Andrea, like most good gardeners, is passionate about soil preparation, and her years of effort showed. Her garden received no rain from May through September, and summer watering was a constant necessity.

Andrea Crawford (left) and Alice Waters compare notes on the edible flowers growing in the Chez Panisse garden. A harvest of edible flowers (right) from the Chez Panisse garden includes hollyhocks, squash blossom, nasturtiums, 'Lemon Gem' marigolds, calendulas, runner beans, and gladiolas.

Nasturtiums and daylilies frame a garden bench.

Andrea and I sat down to discuss both her experiences in the garden and the chefs' experiences in the kitchen. She was eager to sum it all up. She reminded me that she and Alice had been planning a pansy garden for the restaurant and had already planted flats. It had seemed natural to add hollyhocks, scarlet runner beans, anise hyssop, 'Austrian Copper' roses, 'Adnami' chrysanthemums, Alpine strawberries, and 'Lemon Gem' marigolds and to make the new, expanded garden both an ornamental border and a productive garden. We agreed to try to grow the approximate amounts a home gardener would use. "Well," said Andrea, "we planted far more than a person could ever use at home. In fact, that narrow strip, which is thirty feet by two and a half feet, produced more than the restaurant could use; but we viewed the beds as an ornamental garden that a person could also eat out of, and that was really very nice."

Andrea reported that Stokes Seeds had the best selection and that she could get just about all the varieties she needed from them. Thompson & Morgan, on the other hand, turned out to be really frustrating. They offered a large number of varieties, but Andrea found that they often seemed to be out of what she wanted and sent back credit slips instead of seeds.

In the end, the most successful and versatile edible flowers were the species Andrea had always grown for the restaurant—the nasturtiums, borage, and calendulas. Of the new flowers planted, the pansies—all varieties—were probably the most useful and were a lot of fun as well. The chefs used them as garnishes and chopped them into butters. The anise hyssop was very flavorful. The runner blossoms were tasty too—the chefs mixed them with other flowers and put them in salads. "Of the nasturtiums," Andrea told me, "we liked 'Alaska' and 'Empress of India.' The flowers of these varieties are similar to those of most other varieties, but the leaves are beautiful, and when they are small they are quite delicious. We hadn't used those before. With nasturtiums, taste is the most important factor, and that's affected by how you grow them. If you start them without much water, they're quite hot to the taste. They grow best in really lush conditions, and then they're much milder."

On the other hand, the hollyhocks were a complete failure—they didn't have much flavor and had a slippery quality like that of okra. Still, Andrea thought they might be good dipped in batter and fried tempura-style. She went on to say, "Most of the calendulas we tried didn't impress me as much as our simple pot marigolds, which self-seed right here in the garden. They have large flowers and nothing seems to affect them. I don't like 'Kablouna,' because you can't get the petals off the tight head easily. And I found Stokes's claims about their calendulas—all these so-called scarlet, gold, and apricot tones—to be an overstatement. The differences among them are very subtle."

Andrea told me they did a lot of experimenting with the flowers in the kitchen. For example, she picked two deep tubs—that's probably about ten gallons—of nasturtium flowers. She then asked the chefs to get creative with them, and they made a soup with potatoes and the nasturtiums. According to Andrea, it was a total flop. "It was really awful," she said. "It had kind of a slimy texture. So we found out that you can't use nasturtiums in great quantities; they have to be used quite sparingly." Their most successful way of using nasturtiums was to chop them and mash the bits into butter. The butter then looks like it has been laced with confetti, especially when borage and pansies are chopped up along with the nasturtiums, to get blue and purple. "It's very pretty," said Andrea, "and you can put it on pasta, steak, or toast. Alice [Waters] also found this to be a good way to use flowers that have started to wilt. Squash blossoms, too, are wonderful. The chefs stuff them with cheese, or chop and fry them and serve them over pasta. They also saute them with vegetables. Squash blossoms are very versatile and have a pleasant, delicate flavor."

Chez Panisse chefs use flowers not only in salads and butter but in many of their famous desserts. They put fresh flowers on cakes and souffles or candy them and use them whole or chopped. The sugar makes the flowers sparkle. "Very pretty on a chocolate cake," Andrea said. "The chefs sprinkle it on the sides and then, using a small doily as a stencil over the top, make a little design all the way around of sparkling, multicolored glitter. This glitter idea came from using the delicate candied flowers. It turned out to be a great way to use the broken ones."

The chefs love to use the flowers as flavorings in ice cream. Before making the basic custard mix, they steep the petals in milk for as long as it takes to flavor it—anywhere from a few hours to a day, depending on the intensity they want. Then they strain out the flowers. They aim to flavor the custard slightly stronger than they want the end result, because some of the flavor gets lost during freezing. The most successful flower ice cream, and Andrea's personal favorite, is anise hyssop, but the chefs have made ice cream with everything from rose petals, lavender, and almond blossoms to many of the scented geraniums.

"Over the years," Andrea concluded, "we've found that you really have to think about how you use flowers. They should enhance the meal, not just be thrown randomly onto the plate or into the salad. The flower garnishes, for instance, need to have some relation to the food. So thyme flowers in a savory soup or chive blossoms in a salad instead of onion would be great, but just floating pansies by themselves on a soup doesn't make any sense.

"I would definitely grow all the edible flowers again, even the hollyhocks. They're so beautiful, and it's fun to share them with your friends. And there may be ways to use them that I just haven't discovered. I think having a flower border that's entirely edible is a good enough reason in itself to plant it. People who visit the restaurant are delighted with the edible flowers. All in all, it seems a great way to combine the beautiful flowers in the garden with what you enjoy on your table."

interview

Alice Waters

Alice Waters is the proprietor and inspiration behind one of this country's most famous and revolutionary restaurants, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. Although I had worked with Alice casually over the years, I never appreciated her vast range of talent and knowledge until I interviewed her specifically about edible flowers. While other chefs can talk about some of the most common edible flowers, Alice expounds on many with an excitement that's infectious.

"How do patrons react to flowers on their plate?" I asked. "The flowers are a fascination," Alice said. "People really focus on them and are very curious. Some people refuse to eat them, but about half will taste them readily. I like to serve them in such a way that they're tasty and accessible to people; a large flower by itself is a little intimidating. I like to incorporate Johnny-jump-ups or nasturtium petals in salads—or serve them in ice cream or butter."

I gave Alice the list of edible flowers I had compiled and asked her to comment on those she had tried. Her face brightened as she perused the list; she seemed to be able to replay the tastes and feelings of those she had used.

"Calendulas have a real nice flavor," she began. "Not too strong, but kind of peppery—even a little grassy. I use fresh petals in salads, or I like to dry them and use them in soups in the winter. Honeysuckle is good too," she continued. "It's very sweet and tastes just like it smells; it's quite extraordinary in some desserts. You don't need much of it, though, just a little spoonful.

"Lavender is wonderful. You can use it in both sweet and savory dishes, as a marinade for meats, or for lavender ice cream. I'm crazy about nasturtiums too. 'Empress of India,' which has a dark red color, has a spicy, peppery flavor. I enjoy using the 'Alaska' variety in salads because the foliage is so beautiful—variegated green and white. I also use nasturtiums to top soups, salads, or pizzas—for example, smoked salmon pizza. Just put them on top at the last minute so they won't wilt. In butters, the colors and flavors seem suspended.

"And certainly we have to talk about roses and violets. Rose petals are fantastic; they have all different flavors, depending on the variety. On one special occasion I used 'Damask' roses in ice cream and garnished it with deep red-orange 'Joseph's Coat' rose petals that had been dipped in egg white and sprinkled with sugar. Another time I chopped candied rose petals so they looked like little sparklies—very special. I find brightly colored varieties most effective. And we use fragrant violets in late winter; we candy them and then use them to garnish sherbets, or we fold fresh violets into ice cream just before we serve it."

Alice Waters is proprietor of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley and one of the most influential chefs in the world of fresh produce.

The day I interviewed Alice, a gentleman from Texas called to find out if Chez Panisse was the restaurant that served edible flowers; he wanted to come try some. It seems that people are finding delight in trying new tastes, and Chez Panisse leads the way.