Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: May 2010

My mom asked for more flower pictures, so a flower picture it is!

This is a plumed celosia, growing in my mother’s garden. My Mom has a rather large garden, taking up a significant portion of the yard. Well, more like two gardens. There’s a flower garden in front, with a pond, and a vegetable garden in back, with another pond. Currently it’s strawberry season, and we’re getting a bumper crop, 10-20 or more a day. Now if only I was more fond of strawberries (I find them a bit boring).

Interestingly enough, this celosia could go in the vegetable garden as well. It’s fully edible and is a common vegetable in Indonesia, India, and large swaths of Africa. Mainly, the leaves are used, eaten cooked or raw like any other leafy vegetable. The flowers area also edible. There’s actually a large number of edible flowers out there. I still recall one sermon at church back when I was young (9 or 10) where the pastor pulled out some daffodils, talked about them, then ate them! You could probably make a really pretty salad just using flowers, though no one would realize it was a salad.

There’s an odd bit of societal blindness when it comes to uses for plants. The pretty flowers in the garden could be quite suitable for the dinner plate, or it could drop you dead (Oleander is poisonous, if rarely fatally, for instance). And the fruits and vegetables relegated to easily managed beds for easy access to their products can be quite pretty in their own right. I read once that Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her hair, when people were trying to get more people to plant potatoes in Europe (potatoes are in the nightshade family, so there was some understandable trepidation). It’s a pretty flower, too, not at all brown and dumpy as the roots are.

Still, the celosias in my Mom’s garden never get big enough to eat. It’s a variety that emphasizes flowers over leaves, and tends to only be a few inches tall. She tends to buy them cheap off the clearance racks, too, so they’re the runts of the litter anyway. But they are quite pretty, and have an interesting flower with strong colors. They add a bit of spice to a garden. Though I think I shall resist using them in my recipes. I doubt Mom would like it if I took a bite out of her flowers, after all.  Though it does look like someone did nibble on this one.   It wasn’t me, really!

+15