It’s Edimental, My Dear: How to Select and Grow Gorgeous, Delicious Edible Ornamental Plants in Your Garden

Imagine the joy of plucking sun-warmed strawberries to savor as you lounge on the patio, surrounded by a beautiful, boxwood-like hedge of blueberry bushes. Perhaps you want to create a pretty, practical herb garden filled with beautiful flowers and foliage to use in your favorite recipes or garden-fresh cocktails. Or maybe you adore the summery flavors of homegrown tomatoes but dislike the lanky, leggy look of traditional indeterminate vines in your backyard.

You’re in luck if you love homegrown food but desire an Instagram-worthy garden. You’ll find a great selection of edible ornamentals—plants that look lovely while producing bountiful harvests of tasty treats–available from National Garden Bureau members.

What’s Unique about Edible Ornamental Plants?

When you think of growing food in your garden, you probably envision neat rows of lettuce tucked into a back corner of your yard, or towering tomatoes overwhelming raised beds. However, you don’t need to relegate food growing to an inconvenient, tucked-away corner out of sight. Growing food can create a stunning, lush, lovely garden space—when you pick the right plants.

Edible ornamental plants fill your garden with homegrown treats for culinary adventures, but the right plants also add a beautiful aesthetic to your space. From variegated foliage that creates multi-season interest to colorful crops that provide a pretty pop of brightness to lush shrubs that produce delicious fruit while also adding texture and color to the landscape, you’ll find a stunning array of edible ornamentals for your garden. Read more on How to Grow Healthy, Delicious Fruit for those yummy Sweet Treats here.

How to Choose Edible Ornamental Plants for Your Garden

Before you order your first packet of seeds or pick up blueberry shrubs at your local nursery, take some time to assess your garden. How sunny is your garden space? Is the soil rich and well-draining, or do you need to add compost to amend the soil? What’s your USDA hardiness zone? Do you have ample garden space, or will you grow beautiful, productive plants in patio containers?

Just like with anything you grow in the garden, growing edible ornamental plants requires good site selection, well-prepped soil, and a growing plan. Most fruiting plants require full sun for healthy plants and abundant harvests, while some leafy vegetables tolerate part-shade. Soil needs vary, depending on what you plan to grow. Test your soil before you plant so that you can choose appropriate plants that will thrive in your garden—or to learn how to amend your soil, if necessary.

Consider your favorite foods, and then research their growing habits. Take into consideration your USDA hardiness zone, and select edible ornamentals that perform well in your area. But if there are some foods that you love that grow outside your hardiness zone, don’t fret: many plants, like dwarf lemon trees, grow well in a pretty patio pot that can be brought indoors during cold winter months.

A well-planned edible ornamental garden contains an array of plants that provide structure, texture, color, fragrance, and flowers, just like a beautiful, well-planned ornamental landscape—but with the added benefit of delicious harvests.

To help you get started with growing ornamental edibles, take a look at the assortment of plants available from National Garden Bureau members—cultivars that offer high yields, good disease resistance, and aesthetic charm for your garden, as well as newer space-saving compact and dwarf varieties. Whatever fruit, veggies, herbs, and even flowers you love to eat, you’ll find unique, beautiful varieties of edible ornamentals to grow in your garden.

Pretty, Practical Fruit and Veggies for a Gorgeous Garden

Tomatoes

For many gardeners, tomatoes are the gateway to food growing. Who can resist the sun-warmed, savory-sweet flavor of homegrown tomatoes harvested fresh from the backyard? Unfortunately, many tomato plants don’t add a pretty appeal to the garden, with tall, indeterminate vines requiring staking or leaves yellowing with disease. Lucky for us, National Garden Bureau members introduced new varieties that look as lovely as their fruit tastes, with pretty, compact vines, colorful, adorable fruit, and good disease resistance, making it possible to incorporate tomato plants into a beautiful edible ornamental garden.

If tomatoes top your list of favorite summer treats, try Heartbreakers™ Dora Yellow, with bright yellow, tasty, heart-shaped fruit; Siam, part of the Kitchen Minis™ series, with a compact habit, lush leaves, and pretty cherry-red fruit; and Tiny Temptations Orange, an attractive plant bursting with petite, ultra-sweet fruit.

Peppers

Whether you love the sweet crunch of bell peppers or the spicy heat of jalapenos, peppers can make a lovely addition to your garden. While many traditional varieties need staking to support a plant heavy with fruit, new introductions from National Garden Bureau members offer more compact sizes, along with colorful, beautiful fruit to add a burst of interest in the garden.

You’ll even find peppers perfect for containers, like AAS Winner Pot-A Peno, a new jalapeno pepper with a cascading, compact habit perfect for growing in containers and hanging baskets. Part of the Kitchen Mini™ series, Hot Burrito is a pretty, extremely compact plant with upright fruit, ideal for growing in a container or inside on a sunny windowsill or counter. Or if Halloween is your favorite holiday, give your garden a spooky vibe with Pumpkin Spooky Red, a festive pepper plant featuring sweet, pumpkin-shaped fruits that start with a glossy purple-black color and mature to a bright, cheerful red. The plant grows upright and requires no staking or pruning, making it an easy-care choice for any garden. Use these sweet peppers in your favorite recipes or eat fresh in salads.

Swiss Chard

Some veggies look almost too pretty to eat—almost. Swiss chard, for instance, can easily take the place of flowers in adding color and brightness to a garden bed or path. For many years, gardeners used Bright Lights Swiss Chard, with its rainbow of colorful stems, to border raised beds or mix among perennial flowers. Equally pretty and delicious newer introductions include Celebration Swiss Chard, a multi-color chard sporting red, magenta, orange, pink, yellow, and white stems that support glossy, dark green leaves, and Peppermint Swiss Chard, with white petioles sporting pink stripes that form from bottom to top create a visual pop in the garden. Plus, the plant shows very high bolt tolerance.

Figs

You might think that a fig tree will overwhelm your garden. After all, many fig trees require plenty of space to grow and produce fruit. If you love the flavor of figs but garden in a smaller space, you’ll appreciate the dwarf introductions available that grow politely in pots or smaller-space gardens. The uniquely shaped leaves and adorable fruit make figs a great choice to add interest to garden spaces.

Little Miss Figgy is an excellent ornamental and fruit-bearing landscape plant. With a dwarf, compact habit, the plant is smaller and more cold-hardy than comparable figs, yet bears large and more prolific fruits in spring and fall. Likewise, Fignomenal is a dwarf fig cultivar that packs everything lovely about fig trees into a tiny package–growing only two to three feet tall. Packed with flavor, the fruits appear on compact branches, perfect for patio or balcony growing.

If you’re looking for a larger specimen to add charm to a big backyard, consider Kadota Fig. An attractive deciduous garden tree with intriguing branching that provides excellent winter character, this fig produces a reliable fall harvest of especially sweet, greenish-yellow fruit. Highly adaptable, Kadota Fig is often root hardy and prolific in zones 5 and 6 if planted in a sheltered location. The tree grows 15 to 25 feet tall, so give it ample space.

Fragrant, Flavorful Flowers and Herbs for Culinary Creations—and Delightful Gardenscapes

Roses and Lavender: A Perfect Pair

Beautiful blooms are a no-brainer for creating a gorgeous landscape. But when those pretty petals also taste delicious, it’s a fantastic bonus. When creating an edible ornamental garden, you’ll love the addition of Flavorette® Honey-Apricot Rose. Bred for reliable landscape performance and excellent flavor, you’ll enjoy luscious bowl-shaped, petal-filled blooms continuously throughout the summer. Plus, this low-maintenance rose offers great disease resistance and reblooms all summer long—even without deadheading.

Because roses and lavender make such a lovely pairing in the garden and a vase, it makes sense that they also work well together in the kitchen. From beverages to desserts, both blooms look beautiful and taste delicious. And while lavender can be a little temperamental in some growing zones, two new varieties make growing it easy: Phenomenal® Lavender, a variety that’s exceptionally tolerant of both high heat and harsh winters, performing well even in humid areas; and Ellagance Lavender, an award-winning English lavender that flowers the first year from seed. Bushy, uniform plants look lovely along a border, with silvery-green foliage and spires of fragrant, deep purple blooms.

More Herbs and Blooms for Beauty and Flavor

As one of the easiest edible ornamental plants to grow, we couldn’t ignore nasturtium. Not only are the flowers adorable, but the leaves look lovely—and the plant adds a peppery flavor to culinary creations. AAS winner Baby Gold Nasturtium makes a great choice for containers. Petite flowers on a mounding plant contrast beautifully with healthy, dark foliage, making this compact beauty ideal for small space gardens.

Along with nasturtium, Pineapple Sage adds a gorgeous pop of color to the landscape—while also attracting hummingbirds and pollinators to the garden. Chartreuse green leaves glow with lipstick-red spikes of flowers late in the season. Use the leaves like you would garden sage—muddled in drinks, flavoring roasts, or garnishing garden-to-table meals.

For a pretty variegated variety that glows in the garden, try Celebration Sage. The fragrant, golden variegated leaves make an excellent culinary addition, as well as a colorful ornamental perennial. Plus, the plant thrives in heat and drought once established.

Are you ready to create a beautiful edible ornamental garden filled with fabulous fresh food, flowers, and herbs? You’ll adore harvesting delicious homegrown ingredients for garden-to-table meals in your lovely edible ornamental garden.