The Edible Flower Garden is a book by Rosalind Creasy. Rosalind is a leading designer of edible gardens and the author of several award winning edible landscaping books. Below is my review of The Edible Flower Garden.
Why Edible Flowers?
To me there is some kind of fascination with the idea of eating flowers. They are brightly colored, beautiful, and just inherently more interesting than many vegetables. Yet many people shrink from the idea of eating flowers. Rosalind provides encouragement, inspiration, information, and recipes. She explains not only why to eat flowers, but how to.
Which Flowers are Edible?
If you are interested in eating flowers but don’t know which flowers are safe, or even taste good, The Edible Flower Garden contains an encyclopedia section with a 43 different types of edible flowers. Growing conditions, flavor, and preparation instructions are included for each plant as well as details on the varieties which taste the best.
Who would grow these edible flowers -
the gardener in you, or the gardener in your life. The majority of the flowers described by Rosalind are fairly easy to grow, some are highly suitable for beginning gardeners, and all of them are decorative and would make a beautiful garden display. Many of the edible flowers described by Rosalind are annuals and require either a little skill with growing from seeds, or access to a garden center, or catalog source for seeds and/or plants. While a beginning gardener would be inspired by this book, it’s going to be of most use to intermediate skill gardeners.
I Don’t Recommend Edible Flowers for…
families with young children. There’s a chance that a young child might come to assume all flowers are edible. However, a child old enough to understand that only a certain segment of the garden contains edible flowers, or that only certain flowers are safe, and good, to eat might love to give them a try.
How do you eat flowers?
The recipes in this book showed me that there are more ways to eat flowers than I had realized, from delicate rose petal sorbet, to salad, salsa, and flower petal butters. My two favorites are flowers in tempura batter and candied flowers. The lavender shortbread also sounds wonderful.
Summary
This book contains great information for anyone interested in learning more about eating flowers. The photos are beautiful, it’s well written, and both flower gardeners and those who love to grow food should check it out.
You can see inside The Edible Flower Garden, read more reviews, and purchase yourself a copy at Amazon.com.
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