Please, Do Eat
the Violets
Perhaps not
daisies, but surely violets, nasturtiums, pansies, roses, daylilies,
even the bright red flowers of scarlet runner beans and the blue
blossoms of borage. You might want to taste the petals before adding
them to the menu: the center of the flower may be bitter and the
white or green area where the petal is attached may be bitter as
well. We are talking about candied violets for the top of a cake,
spicy bits added to a salad, not a stew of your dead-headed border.
Just a nibble for the novelty of it.
A caution: if
you are gathering squash to stuff for a company dish, give the
cruising bees time to leave. They often nap in a hidden fold,
unheard and unseen.
It is far better
to be safe than sorry in this edible/non-edible debate. A recent
speaker to the Gloucester Master Gardeners was Vickie Shufer, a
Virginia Beach naturalist/publisher who is an expert in wild food
foraging. To arm yourself with information about which plants are
safe to eat and more specifically, how to make them safe and
palatable, consult her web site:
www.ecoimages-us.com.
Not only is it
important to know the time of year when safe-to-eat plants are
available but which parts are to be avoided. We are all familiar
with the delicious green weeds, dandelion, wild cress, and purslane
(portulaca oleracea). Purslane is a persistant weed so eating is in
salad is one way of keeping it out of the rose bed. Rich in vitamins
and omega-3 oils, it is pretty with its shiny curvy leaves and
tastes crispy sweet/sour. Some ethnic dishes use it cooked but I’ve
read it gets slippery, like okra, when stewed.
In olden times,
before weed and seed and such, lawns were bright with dandelions and
in small towns where dandelion wine was concocted in defiance of
prohibition, strangers would neatly pluck the weeds from your lawn.
Actually, harvested before they flower, they are a treat to eat.
Pokeweed,
phytolacca americana, has tender young shoots that can be boiled to
make poke ‘salad’’ but the root is poisonous as are the stems as
they age to red and the older leaves and berries. In boiling those
early shoots, pour off the first two lots of boiling water and
reboil – or just grow spinach? The ‘salad’ in poke salad comes from
the Old English word ‘sallet’ meaning cooked greens.
Back to
blossoms: avoid flowers of azalea, delphinium, foxglove, wisteria,
hydrangea, lantana, lobelia, and oleander. And, despite its name,
sweet pea is not for eating. You already know that daffodils,
rhododendron, lily of the valley, crocus and Jack-in-the-pulpit are
not safe to eat! Legend has it that Alexander the Great died after
having been given a medicinal dose of hellebore. This lovely Lenten
or Christmas rose is poisonous in all its parts which may explain
why the deer leave it alone.
Occasionally
Christmas gifts of Poinsettia are disparaged because the plant is
dangerous. It is not! However, like most euphorbias (milkweeds and
spurges) it has milky sap that will probably irritate your skin if
carelessly handled.
You don’t have
to dine on plants to have them make you ill. Asthma sufferers can be
made miserable by the pollen from several trees. One reason for
seasonal allergies becoming more widespread is the preference for
male trees and shrubs because the female plants make a mess by
dropping fruit. The most notable example is the Ginkgo biloba, the
Maidenhair tree, whose female fruit has a nasty odor. On the other
hand, the male trees dust the air with aggravating pollen for weeks.
Ragweed, neither
tree nor shrub, but weed, is the worst offender, spewing pollen that
can travel on the breeze for miles. When CO2 levels rise so does the
release of pollen, alas. Even lawn grass can release pollen from
small flowers so low the mower misses them. The most allergenic is
Bermuda grass (cynodon dactylon). Fortunately newer cultivars of
this species do not produce pollen. I do wonder how seed is produced
if there is no pollen?
When considering
the potential for harm in every charming garden, don’t overreact and
introduce papier mache’ trees and plastic flowers. Just be sure you
never chew on an un-vetted twig. Signs may help—‘Please don’t sample
the vegetation’.
Other plants are
more a liability than these non-edibles. Kudzu for example is
expensive. Millions have been spent trying to extirpate it from the
seven million acres it inhabits. At Ft.Pickett even tanks could not
move it from the training fields. Oddly, it can be eaten: the leaves
can be fried, the blossoms made into jelly, and the stems turned
into salsa. Bon appetite!