Why I love growing edible flowers

I love growing edible flowers. They look great in containers, attract bees and other insects and add wonderful colour to your salads. They are exotic and unusual, almost impossible to find in the shops, and they lift almost any salad.

Some taste delicious. Nasturtiums have an addictive spicy flavour coupled with a pleasing, slightly crunchy texture. Pot marigold petals have a refreshing, almost tangerine taste. Coriander flowers have nice zip, and thyme flowers taste just like.... thyme. Others like pansy and cornflower just look pretty.

They also make great cut flowers. In fact I prefer them to almost any cut flowers you can buy in the shops. These are sitting on our kitchen table as I write:

Nasturtiums, cornflower, pot marigold, runner bean and one sweet pea (non-edible!)

I visited my neighbour in hospital last week, and took a bunch of edible flowers. When the hospital staff rushed up to tell me 'no flowers' (it's against their new policy) I was able to explain that they were in fact food. This rather confused the staff (who'd never come across such a thing before) and they were allowed to stay.