Tag Archives: Around the Garden in 80 plants

Edimentals talk at the Royal Botanical Gardens

Fun day collecting edimentals from the garden’s collections, making a multi-species salad followed by my talk and walk!
Thanks to all who came and to Sabina Knees for helping out!
Some of the plants we collected were: Gunnera manicata, Saxifraga stolonifera, Hemerocallis spp. (daylilies), Hosta (leaves and flowers), Allium wallichii (two forms), Ligularia fischeri, Allium nutans, Allium schoenoprasum sibiricum, Ostrich Fern, Lilium leichtlinii, Lime leaves, Cacalia (Parasenecio) delphiniifolia, Hops, Aralia cordata (Udo), Aralia elata, Angelica gigas and Aster macrophylla. Flowers of Yucca filamentosa were used in the salad!

It was great to have the chance last week in Bergen to harvest and share the Gunnera tinctoria (Nalca) leaf stalk….the verdict was that it was surprisingly good, sweetly acid flavour (see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=6772)! In Edinburgh, I was able to taste G. manicata for the first time. I’ve never seen evidence for its use. My hunch that this was probably due to it being more fibrous than its smaller cousin was confirmed:
Here’s an album of pictures I took of the amazing Nalca food forests of Chiloe Island in Chile (including being shown by a local how to eat it!): http://www.edimentals.com/pictures/index.php?/category/10
See also http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=677

More pictures of edimentals in the botanics can be seen here: http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=6796

Finally, thanks to my “old” friends Robin and Gwyn Allan (with an A), Diane Blakeley and Pete Fordham and our hosts Sabina Knees and Martin Gardner for not heckling during the proceedings ;) (we had a great reunion weekend in Edinburgh, not having met for some 35 years or more!)