Maybe I’ve been exposed to too many great ideas at flowers shows and botanic gardens around the world, but traditional ways of sorting plants by genre are blurred to me. I don’t see veggies, fruits, and herbs as just food to be sequestered all to themselves.
To me edibles are as lovely as other flowers, and I grow them accordingly in flower beds and pots; when mixed as companions with small shrubs and perennial and annual flowers, their shapes, leaf textures, flowers, and fruit colors are pure bonus to the usual fare. Difference is, when I tire of admiring their looks, I can eat them.
Take okra for example. A 10th generation Southerner probably shouldn’t confess this publicly, but I don’t actually eat okra, unless it has been battered, fried, and slathered in ketchup; I even pick around it in soups and gumbo. Yet I grow it every year around my garden and in the herb garden at the ag museum in Jackson.
In addition to its long seed pods, the big, bold African hibiscus relative, one of the most durable heat and drought resistant flowering annuals around, sports big white or pale yellow flowers. I leave dried pods on the dead plants well into winter as attractive garden accents, and often cut dried stems as linear elements in dried floral arrangements, or paint as holiday tree ornaments.
And there are dozens of distinct varieties ranging in size from waist-high to towering overhead, with pods that can be short and squat or long and skinny; different leaf colors are a plus. One of my favs is the heirloom named Burgundy, which has nearly maroon leaves and seedpods (which turn green when cooked, or so I am told); because of its nearly white flowers I am surprised more MSU alumni don’t grow it to show their school colors.
My North Carolina friend Chris Smith wrote an entire book called The Whole Okra, a surprisingly fascinating treatise on the many types, traditions, growing tips, and whole-plant cookbook of this traditional Southern plant. He quoted my studies in an okra variety trial in the botanical garden just outside Georgetown, Ghana, where I compared dozens of varieties for both looks and production; some were heavier producers in that hot, dry climate, a boon for commercial market growers; others matured a few pods at a time over many months which suits home gardeners better.
To cut to the chase, I’m trying to convince folks that okra perfectly fills the concept of an edimental, the portmanteau coined by Norwegian garden writer Stephen Barstow for plants which are both ornamental and edible. I combine many of them in two small potager or mixed kitchen gardens and seem to have fewer problems with any of them compared to their being grown in traditional skinny rows or borders.
And there are so many which go way beyond simply planting okra and colorful peppers in with mums and lilies. A few great edementals to, er, chew on would include marigolds, salvia, both blue and purple kinds of kale, Swiss chard, orange daylilies (whose flower buds have the same nutrition as broccoli),red-veined sorrel, violas, elephant garlic, scarlet runner beans, purple basil, variegated sage, burgundy mustard, rosemary, chives and garlic chives, mints, fennel, Malabar spinach, Jerusalem artichoke (a tall, fall-blooming sunflower with edible tubers), burgundy perilla, bee balm, Mexican mint marigold, turmeric and gingers and so many others.
Edimentals are more garden design than how-to. It just means mixing stuff up for multiple benefits in more interesting garden settings. And, turns out, the once-lowly okra is more than just a slimy
vegetable.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi
author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com
