A Floral Feast: A Guide to Growing and Cooking with Edible Flowers, Foliage, Herbs and Seeds

How to grow and harvest an abundant supply of edible ingredients from your garden.

Flowers have probably been used in cooking for as long as people have been preparing and flavoring food. In China cooks were experimenting with chive flowers in 3000 BC and the Romans frequently added blooms to their dishes. Today flowers are often seen as an exotic extra, employed only by professional chefs. While we are all taking a greater interest in the provenance of our food, adding more plant-based ingredients to our diets, experimenting with growing our own vegetables and eating to follow the seasons, edible flowers remain a bit of an unknown quantity.

This book demystifies the idea of eating flowers and introduces readers to a whole range of blooms, leaves, flowering herbs and edible seeds that can be home-grown and used in a new way – by adding them to food. From drying hibiscus petals to concocting a soothing tisane, harvesting nigella seeds to use in savory biscuits, or baking a lemon-scented pelargonium cake, garden-grown flowers make wonderful ingredients – and align directly with the important current message of seasonal, sustainable growing. Dunster shows how to grow an abundance of flowers to guarantee a regular and plentiful supply of chemical-free ingredients.

Includes information on harvesting, drying and preserving methods, and a wide range of culinary uses and techniques.

Carolyn Dunster is a botanical stylist, planting designer and garden writer. She writes about flowers, plants and productive gardens for various magazines including Bloom, Wildflower, The Garden and The English Garden. Previous books include Urban Flowers (Frances Lincoln, 2017) and Cut & Dry (Laurence King, 2021).