Category Archives: Edimentals

Little Garden Fish: A New Unexpected Edimental

Those that have read my book and follow my blog will know how much I love the stories that follow edible plants around the world and discovering those ornamental plants that I had never expected could be used in the kitchen, turning them into edimentals! My book Around the World in 80 plants is full of them!
The plant known as little vegetable garden fish in Brazil is a case in point and I have to thank Kyle Dougherty for alerting to me to this unlikely edible on my Edimentals and Perennial Vegetables Facebook group.
Brazil isn’t a likely place to search for novel edibles that would be hardy enough to grow in my 63.4°N garden. However, I actually grew this plant for many years before removing it to make way for edible plants. It is Stachys byzantina (syn. S. lanata or S. olympica), lamb’s-ear or woolly hedge nettle (lammeøre here in Norway). It is a perennial in the Lamiaceae or mint family which is native to Armenia, Iran, and Turkey but has been cultivated throughout the temperate world as an ornamental plant, and has escaped, naturalising in many locations. Here in Norway, it doesn’t seem to produce seed, so only spreads vegetatively. It is surprisingly very hardy and is said to be worth trying more or less anywhere here.

So, how is it that the use of this plant from West Asia and known as “peixinhos da horta”, literally little vegetable garden fish in Brazil, is more or less isolated to that country today? In Brazil, the dish and plant have the same name. Some suggest that the name little garden fish is because the taste is fish-like, but others say that it doesn’t taste of fish at all. It’s more likely that it’s because the fried and battered leaves resemble small fish and maybe the association leads to people experiencing a fishy taste? There are a number of “how to” videos on youtube, with and without egg (à Milanesa) (see, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=peixinho+da+horta)

Peixinhos da Horta prepared “à Milanesa” (with egg) in Brazil; see the “how to” video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhergrWMki0

It is said that the plant is also used as tea, in omelettes, pasta, steamed and in salads (youngest leaves).
Over the last 10 years several studies of non-conventional vegetables including this plant and its preparation have been published addressing also medicinal uses and nutrition; e,g., “Stachys byzantina (Lamiaceae) has a high nutrient content compared with conventional vegetables including vitamin C, carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, high fiber content, minerals (potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur, copper, iron, manganese, zinc and boron) and high content of phenolic compounds which gives antioxidant activity” (Aguiar et al., 2020).
However, the dish of the same name in Portugal is made from cut green bean pods, coated in batter, and fried in oil at high temperatures, but is also prepared with other vegetables, such as pumpkin and green peppers. Intriguingly, these green beans, usually Phaseolus vulgaris, travelled the other way from the Americas to Europe. Was the use of Stachys byzantina in this dish an old way of preparing it which has now died out or did it evolve independently in Brazil based on the basic recipe (there are strong connections of course between Portugal and Brazil). I haven’t been able to find an answer to this question but the fact that the Portuguese name for the plant is peixinho-da-horta , lambari or simply peixinho suggests it was used in the past. The Portuguese wiki page states only that the plant is used in Brazil or was it the other way round and the inspiration came from Brazil?
I have only found one reference in the ethnobotanical literature to Stachys byzantina being wild foraged in its native area. Civelek and Balkaya (2013) list some 19 wild vegetables in the Black Sea region of Turkey, providing a nutritional analysis of all and stating only that the leaves are roasted. The table below from this paper lists all 19.

Table of wild foraged species and how they are used in the Black Sea region (Civelek and Balkaya, 2013)

A number of cultivars exist including white flowering and dwarf forms (see https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/search-results?query=stachys%20byzantina):
‘Big Ears’ – leaves very large, up to 25 cm long.
‘Cotton Boll’ – a sterile cultivar that does not produce flowering stems. Asexually propagated.
‘Primrose Heron’ – leaves yellow in spring; flowers pink
‘Sheila Macqueen’ – sterile; low-growing; leaves large.
‘Silky Fleece’ – grows 25 cm tall with lilac-plum flowers, produce smaller white-woolly foliage. Seed propagated.
‘Silver Carpet’ – sterile; leaves grey. Asexually propagated.
‘Striped Phantom’ – leaves variegated.
There are other examples of plants that have travelled far before being adopted in another country far from home. Shungiku or chopsuey greens (Glebionis coronaria),is an important supermarket vegetable today in Japan, but there are only sparse records of use in the past in the Mediterranean countries where it originated. See https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=22710
A story says that the dish peixinhos da horta was introduced to Japan by Portuguese sailors Antonio da Mota, Francisco Zeimoto and Antonio Peixoto in the sixteenth century, where it was eventually developed into tempura: I wonder what plants were used at that time. Did our lamb’s ears make another long journey together with the recipe? In Japanese the plant is known as cotton chorogi. Chorogi is another edible in the Stachys genus, S. sieboldii, also known as the Chinese artichoke (see picture gallery of other edibles in the genus Stachys below).
I found at least one page Stachys byzantina, a largely ornamental plant also in Japan, is prepared with tempura – see https://ameblo.jp/eruma56/entry-11581777515.html (it notes, however, that this plant arrived in Japan in the early 20th century).
Stachys byzantina is also of value to many insects and hummingbirds (the latter in the Americas, of course), but in particular bees. The wool carder bee / storullbie (Anthidium manicatum) even collects the fuzz from the leaves, used in nest making in decayed wood. It has also been documented that bumble bees congregate early in the day to collect the water condensation that has accumulated on the leaves. This is therefore a multi-purpose plant, edible, nature friendly as well as ornamental, what I term an edi-ento-mental!

Anthidium manicatum by Bruce Marlin – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=662209

Here are pictures of  a few other plants in the genus Stachys

Civelek, C. and Balkaya, A. 2013. The nutrient content of some wild plant species used as vegetables in Bafra Plain located in the Black Sea Region of Turkey. The European J. Plant Science and Biotechnology.
Aguiar, T., Nues, A. and de Souza Damasceno, M., 2020. Unconventional food plants foud in Santa Catarina State: nutritional and therapeutic potential. Revista Eletrônica Científica Ensino Interdisciplinar. Mossoró, v.6, #18 (see http://dx.doi.org/10.21920/recei72020618731753)

Edimentals and Perennial Veg in the RHS The Garden magazine

I have some great news to share! My word edimentals, “invented” some 17 years ago to describe those amazing plants that are both edible and ornamental – has just gone mainstream in the UK with an 8 page article written by me and published in the April edition of the RHS magazine The Garden (600,000 circulation) and one of my multi species salads even graces the front page. On the back of various show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show in London over the last couple of years profiling edimentals and numerous magazine articles featuring one of horticulture’s buzz words. I was contacted by the RHS last November to see if I would be interested in writing an article – who’s better than the word’s inventor to write this feature for the magazine they said!
There’s also a nice interview with Mandy Barber of The Incredible Vegetables nursery on perennial vegetables! I enclose pictures of the article and a picture of the front page. I’ve been a member of the RHS since the early 80s and, although my interest is edible plants, I’ve always enjoyed the magazine for its focus on plants. Although the focus had largely been ornamental, I recognised the edible value! With greatly increased interest in edibles and nature friendly gardening within the RHS, the magazine can only get better, so please consider joining! As I mention in the article and my book Around the World in 80 plants, my first perennial vegetable was sea kale and I bought so-called sea kale thongs (root cuttings) through an advert I read in The Garden when visiting my gardening friend Robin Allan in Hexham in the early 80s! One of those plants is still alive in my garden today.
My other portmanteau words edi-ento-mental and edi-avi-mental are still waiting for adoption! They refer of course to plants that are both edible and ornamental and either insect (e.g., pollinator) or bird friendly and there are even a few quadruple value plants that tick all 4 boxes!
Please buy my book from the publishers Permanent Publications in the UK: https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/port/around-the-world-in-80-plants-an-edible-perennial-vegetable-adventure-for-temperate-climates-by-stephen-barstow or directly from me in Norway!
Below the pdf higher resolution article and picture below you may find an extended list of favourite edimentals suggested by my 5,000 strong Edimentals and Perennial Vegetables FB group.



Download (PDF, 1.15MB)

Of all the perennial vegetables out there, which do you think are the tastiest?
This was the question I posed the 5,000 members of my FB group Edimentals and Perennial Vegetables, founded in 2011! This has been the most popular thread ever! These were the answers (comments by members; numbers refer to number of members mentioning the plant) :
Homesteader’s Kaleidoscope Perennial Kale Grex and Taunton Deane kale (4), asparagus (4),  Toona sinensis, yellow daylily (flower buds) (2), skirret (6), sea kale (shoots and broccolis) (4), Aralia elata (in tempura), cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum; young leaves and flower stalks) (2), Hosta shoots and young leaves (4), Japanese bladdernut Staphylea bumalda (leaves and flower buds), hop (shoots), garlic chives, Campanula takesimana (leaves; Korean bellflower) (2), Tilia sp. (young leaves) (2), marshmallow (shoots; Althaea officinalis), Rhus typhina (peeled shoots; staghorn sumac), Typha sp. (bulrush: shoots and rhizomes), groundnut (Apios americana) (4), Babington’s leek and other wild leeks (2), crosnes (Chinese artichokes) (3), Turkish rocket (broccolis), Hablitzia tamnoides (raw or sauteedI “SO much easier than growing spinach”) (3), any Allium, Maximilian Sunflower (Helianthus maximiliani), sorrels (4), good king henry (spinach), Jerusalem artichokes (lactofermented or roasted) (3), Mertensia maritima, globe artichokes (3), cardoon (leaf ribs), nettles (5), Rudbeckia laciniata (sochan) (2), Scorzonera hispanica (shoots and flower buds) (3), rhubarb (in dahl) (2), Lilium sp. (bulbs in soups and roasted), Malva moschata (musk mallow; leaves), Allium cepa “Perutile” (everlasting onion, growing on an Edinburgh allotment for 100 years!), Angelica archangelica, ramsons (2), chicory, Allium triquetrum, Valeriana officinalis, Napaea dioica (glade mallow), Phytolacca americana (pokeweed; properly prepared), red valerian (shoots), sea beet (leaves), bladder campion (shoots), ground elder, Taraxacum sp. of course (its rich and complex flavour knows no equal; incl. roots) (4), chayote (2), pignut, greater pignut (Bunium bulbocastanum), Sonchus arvensis (I snack on the bittersweet flower buds all summer, can’t resist them), rock samphire (Crithmum), water lotus and water chestnuts (3), alexanders (young shoots; Smyrnium), Canna edulis (2), taro (Colocasia) (2), yacon, Sagittaria (duck potatoes), Hibiscus, honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis), fool’s watercress (Apium nodiflorum), Chinese yam (Dioscorea polystachya), Basella, Asclepias incarnata (swamp milkweed; pods), loroco (Echites panduratus), Cardamine raphanifolia, sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata), Sanguisorba minor, Dystaenia takesimana (seombadi)




Asteraceae: valuable autumn flowering edientomentals!

When giving talks I like to renew myself and talk about something different each time. For my talk in Copenhagen at the Future Heirloom event last weekend I focussed during part of my presentation on edimentals in the Asteraceae or Compositae (the aster or daisy family / kurvplantefamilien). These are tbe edible perennial vegetables that are most obvious in the autumn garden and often underutilised by chefs in the west. Visiting the World Garden a few days before my talk on 17th October, I gathered flowers from all the flowering Asteraceae and here they are with names:Most are used for their tasty spring shoots and leaves, used cooked and raw, and most have a characteristic fragrant taste / aroma loved in the Far East (as also Chrysanthemum tea is popular and a refreshing accompaniment to spicy dishes). Aster scaber and Ligularia fischeri are nowadays both cultivated in a big way as “sannamul” in Korea and even exported to Korean markets around the world. Young shoots of other Aster sp. are  foraged in Asia as is big-leaf Aster, Aster macrophyllus, in North America. Also from North America, cutleaf coneflower Rudbeckia laciniata or sochan was a popular vegetable for the Cherokee first people and in recent years has, maybe not unsurprisingly become a commercial vegetable in Korea. Annual shungiku or chopsuey greens Glebionis coronaria  hails from the Mediterranean but is today an important vegetable in the Far East! Others currently in flower are best known as root crops, including (in the picture) Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) and Dahlia. Yacon (Polymnia sonchifolia) is also autumn flowering but doesn’t manage to flower here (is moved indoors to flower and bulk up). The final flower in the picture is marigold Calendula officinalis, whose culinary use includes decorating and flavouring salads, soups and other dishes.
Late flowering also means that the Asteraceae are also particularly important for a range of insect pollinators like hoverflies, drone flies and bees as can be seen in the pictures below, all taken in the World Garden:




PEAK PERENNIAL VEG TIME AT RHS WISLEY

A series of pictures taken of edible plants that I spotted in the “ornamental collections” at RHS Wisley Gardens on 11th April 2024.  Admittedly, some will be obscure or “emergency food” edibles, but all have been used somewhere for food and have an ethnobotanical story to tell!
See also an earlier post from a visit on 28th June 2013 at https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=32483 
I was also shown around all the great work being done by the Wisley Edibles Team later the same day; see 

See the picture captions for names and use:

 

Dandelions in pink, white and yellow

16th May 2024: Dandelions in white, pink and (self-sowed) yellow in the Asian part of the World Garden at the Væres Venner Community Garden in Trondheim. I planted both Taraxacum albidum, Taraxacum leucanthum and Taraxacum pseudoroseum in this part of the garden and suspect these are albidum and pseudoroseum but am not sure. Will post separate albums below showing detailed studies of the pink and white one in case anyone has a key to these (there are several white flowered dandelion species in Asia).

Botanical details of what I’m growing as Taraxacum pseudoroseum in the World Garden at the Væres Venner community garden in Trondheim:

Botanical details of what I’m growing as Taraxacum albidum in the World Garden at the Væres Venner community garden in Trondheim. Anyone have a key to this species?

EDIMENTALS REACH MAINSTREAM HORTICULTURE

My attention was drawn today to two articles in which my word Edimentals featured (made up in the late 2000s):
EDIMENTALS AT CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW
“Edimental plants that are both edible and ornamental have emerged as a star of the Chelsea Flower Show.”
The article from the Daily Telegraph about this year’s Chelsea Flower Show can be read in the 3 pictures! 
The second article had actially been published last year on the BBC Food site. Here’s the link to “The low-maintenance edible garden for lazy gardeners” which both mentions Edimentals and credits me with the word!

Megacarpaea delavayi

This is one of the most exclusive vegetables and finest edimentals out there, Megacarpaea delavayi (Brassicaceae), a plant found in the high mountains of southwest China at high altitudes (3000–4800 m), and one of the most beautiful! Flora of China says it grows in swampy meadows, grassy slopes and open thickets. It also states that it is used for medicine and as a vegetable. Consulting Google Scholar I found a paper “Eating from the wild: diversity of wild edible plants used by Tibetans in Shangri-la region, Yunnan, China” by Yan Ju et al. (2013) which states that the young stems and leaves are used.
I purchased two young plants I found for sale in a small selection of plants for sale at the Gothenburg Botanical Gardens shop in Sweden in 2011. They took two years to flower and set seed in a shady, dry spot in my garden. It is thought that Megacarpaea can be monocarpic (dying after flowering) but it did come back three more years but grew weakly and did not flower again. I therefore moved the plant to a new location in 2016 which was a bad move as it died…
Sadly, I never did get to eat some….
I put the seed I harvested on my seed list two years in a row and sent to a few people, so if you are one of them and have seed, I am very interested! I germinated some of those seed myself (picture), but I don’t recall what happened to them…

First 2023 Edimental Flowers

Despite the fact that the soil is frozen solid apart from the top couple of cms, I was surprised to discover the year’s first flowers in the garden: 
1. I received this as Primula veris subsp. macrocalyx but is always a couple of months earlier than Primula veris, so I wonder if it’s a hybrid?

2. Primula elatior (oxlip / hagenøkleblom) – this could also be a hybrid

“Over the top” Flowery Whopper Carrot Salad

I was going to post an album of pictures showing off all the late flowers in the garden this record-breaking mild autumn still without any frost, but as they’re all edible I made a salad instead!
There were 33 different edible flowers (see the list below the pictures) plus 30-40 greens and a whopper carrot which I decided to keep whole as a feature! It was cut up when the salad was tossed afterwards. It has a story too as it is one of the Danish accessions rematriated from Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) in the US last winter. I took a few seed before sending the rest on to Danish Seed Savers (Dansk Frøsamlerne). It’s called Kämpe which means Giant in Swedish/Danish (I call it Whopper as it’s probably the biggest/thickest carrot I¨’ve grown here). It’s not a very old variety and SSE informed that it was a cultivated variety originally from the Swedish seed company Weibulls. Anyone know more about it?
Salad flowers, all harvested from the garden
Salvia (blackcurrant sage / solbærsalvie)
Fuchsia magellanica
Hemerocallis “Stella de Oro”
Taraxacum spp. (dandelion / løvetann)
Rubus fruticosus (blackberry / bjørnebær)
Papaver somniferum (opium poppy / opium valmue)
Viola altaicum
Campanula persicifolia (peach-leaf bellflower / fagerklokke)
Sonchus oleraceus (common sow-thistle / haredylle)
Glebionis coronaria (chopsuey greens / kronkrage) (3 varieties)
Daucus carota (carrot / gulrot) (unopened flower umbel)
Geranium sanguineum (bloody cranesbill / blodstorkenebb)
Brassica oleracea (kale / grønnkål)
Oenothera biennis (evening primrose / nattlys)
Begonia
Malva moschata (musk mallow / moskuskattost) (white and pink flowered)
Malva alcea (hollyhock mallow / rosekattost)
Monarda fistulosa (wild bergamot / rørhestemynte)
Monarda “Elsie Lavender”
Calendula officinalis (pot marigold / ringblomst (2 varieties)
Campanula trachelium (nettle-leaved bellflower / nesleklokke)
Calamintha nepeta (lesser calamint / liten kalamint)
Tropaeolum majus (nasturtium / vanlig blomkarse) (2 varieties)
Pisum sativum (garden pea / ert)
Origanum spp. (wild marjoram / bergmynte) (2 varieties)
Campanula lactiflora
Alcea rosea (hollyhock / stokkrose)
Tragopogon pratensis (Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon / geitskjegg)