Roses are beautiful additions to any garden, and petals and rose hips can also add to your cooking.
In “Eat Your Yard! Edible Trees, Shrubs, Vines, Herbs and Flowers for Your Landscape,” author Nan K. Chase shares her first-hand experience with gardening, landscaping ideas and special culinary uses for fruit trees. Recipes for edible garden plants include the crabapple and quince, nut trees, such as the chestnut and almond, and herbs and vines like the bay, grape, lavender, mint, and thyme. She instructs how to harvest pawpaw, persimmon, and other wildflowers for your meal as well as figs, kumquats, olives and other favorites.
Eat Your Yard! (Gibbs Smith, 2010) has information on 35 edible plants that offer the best of both landscape and culinary uses. Edible garden plants provide spring blossoms, colorful fruit and flowers, lush greenery, fall foliage, and beautiful structure, but they also offer fruits, nuts, and seeds that you can eat, cook, and preserve. Roses are especially delightful for creating an edible landscape, as shown in the following excerpt.
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Buy this book in the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Eat Your Yard!
Read more from Eat Your Yard!
• Edible Mint for Your Garden
• Growing Hazelnuts in the Garden
Eating Roses
The rose is a botanical mothership with connections to much of what grows in our gardens: everything from nectarines to strawberries.
“Queen of flowers!” one source exclaims.
Roses have universal appeal for the intense perfume and entrancing beauty of their flowers. They also help pollination among other plants.
There are wild roses native to North America, or introduced and naturalized, which are adaptable from seaside to mountaintop. And there are hybridized roses, with thoroughbred refinement, suitable only where the climate cooperates and people can pamper them.
Wild roses, to make the situation more complicated, can be quite good in the garden — or highly destructive.
Let’s agree to cheat and consider several native North American roses and several imported roses together (imported, that is, during colonial times or earlier and then spreading) before choosing the most useful and least intrusive for the edible landscape.
First, a word about why roses should be considered edible at all.
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