Flowers and Edible Landscaping

Our garden is not a flower garden. I drive by beautiful yards full of flowers and experience momentary longing for lots of flowers. But ours is mostly an edible landscaping. We do plant some flowers, however.

In the spring, we have daffodils and grape hyacinth. 

We have some flowering trees – crab apple, chokecherries, and plums. In the summer, we have daisies and roses.



In late summer, we have Russian sage, sunflowers, marigolds and mums.

I have a few planters that I fill with annuals. I plant marigolds around all our garden beds. They are supposed to keep the pests down – I’m not sure that’s the case – but they do look lovely around the yard and gardens.

Most of these flowers attract bees. Bees have it hard enough right now, so the more habitat that’s provided for them, the better.

This year, I experimented with edible flowers and edible landscaping. It’s been a great success. We had an area in the front yard that just never worked. We tried perennials, we mulched them, and we tried digging things up and replanting. Nothing worked. It still filled up with weeds or grass. 

So we dug everything up (transplanted a few elsewhere) and hubby built three beautiful raised beds. We mulched around the beds with wood chips. I put some pretty wire trellises in the middle of each bed. Then I planted basil, red lettuce, spinach, Bibb lettuce, radishes (I planted a variety called Easter egg – purple, pink, white and red), carrots, Swiss chard (Bright Lights):

 peas, onions:

scarlet runner beans:

pansies, and nasturtiums.

It worked out great – we started eating salad greens in about 4 weeks after planting. Each bed produced an astonishing amount of vegetables. We had baby carrots, green onions, baby salad greens, and flowers. We found it’s wonderfully fun to eat flowers in our salad. Pansies are very mild, and nasturtiums are slightly spicy.

The scarlet runner bean flowers are not edible, but the beans are and they make a lovely backdrop to the rest of the garden. They are beautiful beds.

So next time you plant some lettuce, plant some edible flowers along with them – the bees love them and so will you.