Beautiful, edible perennial plants to transform your garden

Edimentals - what are they?

Marrying the edible and the ornamental, edimental plants offer a range of fabulous and unusual flavours, combined with low maintenance and beauty - everything one could want from a plant. Foraging in your own garden is a shortcut to reconnecting with our living world. Meanwhile, edimentals definitely bring a certain glamour to gardening, having featured in a number of gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show in recent years!

Gotta love an annual popping up in an inconvenient spot! This delightful Chinese mallow (Malva verticillata crispa), claiming a spot mid patio, is one of my regular ‘crypto-crops’ - not deliberately sown but nonetheless welcomed with deli
Really love this Japanese aster (Kalimeris incisa) - such a winner. Really long flowering and surely enough to brighten up any pollinator’s day. The #edimental aspect is its spring shoots - a flavourful green that works well braised or lightly
The Perennial Lettuce strikes again! After a dormant moment in high summer this fabulous #edimental is flowering for a second time and producing a new crop of beautiful crisp leaves. Hoping to have a number for sale at @arnold_circus plant fair this
Aster season is on us! New to me this year, really loving this effervescent Blue Wood Aster. #Edimental (you’d expect nothing less!) with nice young leafy greens. Pollinators would adore it if there were many this summer (#climatecrisis) but di
The stunning Korean bellflower (Campanula takesimana or “seomchorongkkot” for the Korean speakers out there). Edible top to bottom, this is honestly one of my favourite #edimentals which I’ve been growing ever since I became a garde
What’s not to like? Edible, beautiful…. And just a little bit invasive. Ground elder 😱 but in its arguably more sophisticated, less unruly form. 🤩
These perennial lettuce flowers seem to be a different colour every time I walk past. Here they are late afternoon… a morning shot in sun to follow! One of the most beautiful salad plants around IMO
Could a ‘weed’ BE more stunning?! My favourite ever Dandelion, Taraxacum rubifolium, native to the Faroe Islands. Edible top to bottom, but if I’m honest I grow them just for the perverse but exhilarating thrill of growing a purple-