40 years ago this month I came to Norway to find a place for us to live as I was to start work at Institutt for kontinentalsokkelundersøkelser (IKU; Continental Shelf Institute) in Trondheim in October 1981. The flat I found was here in Malvik kommune (Torp). To celebrate 40 years in Malvik I made a salad with 40 different genera. The names of the genera are below the pictures!
Presenting some of this week’s perennial greens and, in the case of the blanched Hosta shoots, perennial whites! Hosta sieboldiana with ramsons / ramsløk (Allium ursinum) and giant bellflower / storklokke (Campanula latifolia)
Chelidonium majus (from the poppy family Papaveraceae), or greater celandine (Norw: Svaleurt), is an important plant in western phytotherapy and in traditional Chinese medicine and is known here in Norway as a relic plant, often found around the ruins of old monasteries. I introduced it to my garden some 25 years ago or more. At one time I decided to remove it as it wasn’t in the theme of the garden of edible plants (although there are records of it being eaten with careful preparation, but definitely in the famine food category). However, it has naturalised in a mild way, popping up here and there and I tolerate it as it’s an interesting and nice lookin plant (a medimental; medicinal ornamental). I’ve also in the past introduced a cut-leaf form (var. laciniata) and also a double flowered form. The latter I thought I’d lost and then it turned up again this week, the reason for this post:
Here’s the normal form in another bed in the garden and the characteristic orange plant juice which is the part most used medicinally in treatment of a range of skin ailments:
As usual, the first seed of edible plants to be collected from the garden is dandelion, this year on the last day of May. The moss-leaved dandelion (Taraxacum sublaciniosum “Delikatess”):
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
