The Edible Flower Garden. Rosalind Creasy

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      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.

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