Edible flowers are some of the first wild foods to show up after the long, cold winter. These tasty flowers add delicious, unusual flavors and colors to many different dishes. Plus many of these flowers are high in phytonutrients and have medicinal properties. Spring is definitely my favorite season, there’s so much wild food appearing!
Common And Not So Common Edible Flowers
I’ve already made flower jelly with dandelions and violets. Here’s a link to my Dandelion Flower Jelly post if you want to make some.
Violets (Viola odorata) are a common flower in lawns and gardens. They’re so prolific, it’s easy to gather a bunch of flowers in no time. Violet flowers are wonderful in salads, vinegar, as jelly, added to desserts and sugared for a treat. Take advantage of the short time they are available, you won’t be sorry!
I also gather the leaves to infuse in oil for several weeks for topical use. The oil is wonderful for healing skin issues. Violet leaves can be used in salads, soups or omelettes.
Eastern redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) flowers are one of the more unusual flowers you’ll ever eat in the spring. The flavor is lemony sweet with hints of peas. The redbud tree is in the legume family, its a pea tree!
The flowers, seed pods and young leaves are eaten raw or cooked. Some people pickle the flower buds and use them like capers. The flowers can be sprinkled into a salad, used as a garnish or even baked into cookies or cakes. The young leaf and flower buds can also be added into a stir fry, salad, or even lightly sautéed with other greens as a vegetable side dish.
Purple dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum) are not actually nettles, they’re a member of the mint family. Dead nettle has the characteristic square stems of the mint family.
The young leaves can be harvested and eaten raw or cooked as a potherb. The purple tops even have a slight sweetness to them. You can use them as you would any other green leaf vegetable or herb. Fresh leaves are made into a tea to drink to help combat allergies.
White clover (Trifolium repens) flowers are a bit sweet and make a great tea, especially iced tea. The flowers are added to baked goods and infused in honey. The raw flowers are hard to digest but are tender when you stir-fry or sauté them with vegetables.
White clover is preferable to red clover, though both are edible. Make sure to pick flowers that are free of wilted brown petals.
Wood sorrel (Oxalis) flowers are small but their delicious sourness and lemon taste makes them great for snacking, in salads, on seafood, or any food you might season with lemon. I like both the leaves and flowers for snacking, they have just the right amount of lemony sour flavor to feel refreshing.
The flowers appear in mid to late spring, anywhere from early April to early June. The flowers can be yellow, pink, or white.
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is a legume and the flower’s flavor is sweet like sugar peas. The clusters of flowers are tasty eaten raw, in salads or using in stir-fries. For best flavor and texture, pick them in the morning while the nectar is abundant.
Only the flowers of the black locust are edible. The leaves and the rest of the tree are toxic, causing digestive system problems.
Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale ) flowers seem to be everywhere by mid-spring. These are one of my favorite plants, I can’t get enough of dandelions! The flowers make an excellent fritter, they can be eaten raw or steamed, added to salads, or sprinkled as tiny petals over rice and pasta.
The yellow petals are sweet but pick away the green parts because they are bitter. The young leaves are excellent in salads, cooked like spinach or mix cooked leaves in rice.
There are literally hundreds of edible flowers that can be harvested to use in food, I’ve listed just a few to get you thinking!
