Ornamental bulbs that are good enough to eat

It’s officially bulb-planting season again, but for a greedy gardener like me there is often a tense trade-off between what space I dedicate to ornamentals and what I leave for edibles in my tiny urban patch. Fortunately, there is one genus of bulbs that can combine the best of both worlds, giving you dazzling colour and a tasty treat at the same time come spring. These are ornamental alliums and they taste as good as they look.

As all alliums are very closely related, they produce most of the same flavour compounds and have similar internal chemistry. All plant parts of all species are perfectly edible – in theory. Do not eat recently purchased ornamental allium bulbs as these may have been treated with pesticides not suitable for human consumption. And always make sure you have your plant ID right as many narcissi many look similar to onions to the untrained eye.

Those caveats out of the way, the allium species that we only know as ornamental in the modern west often live double lives unbeknown to us as prized ingredients in other parts of the world. My concern was whether you could harvest the flowers and leaves of ornamental varieties for a perennial, extremely low-maintenance crop without denting next year’s display.

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As it often does, curiosity got the better of me, so in 2014 I pored over the scientific literature and ran an informal trial into the viability of harvesting from ornamental alliums – and, in deed, into whether you’d want. After all, as I have discovered, there is a big difference between technically edible and actually worth eating!

There are reports of the “nodding onion” Allium cernuum being eaten by Native Americans and the plants I grew yielded wonderfully pungent leaves and flowers. A real bonus is that its powder-pink umbels of flowers, as the name suggests, gracefully nod towards the ground when young, and slowly reach toward the sun as they mature.

Another stunning pink one is Allium roseum, which looks like bundles of Japanese cherry blossom. In a recent flavour trial at the University of Bologna, this variety beat three other Mediterranean native alliums hands down for scores on scent, flavour and visual appeal – a result with which I concur.

If you are after something brighter and bolder it doesn’t more fun than ‘Fireworks Mix’, producing loose, spritely pom-poms in fuchsia pink, ice white and canary yellow. Beautiful in the garden and a real showstopper in the salad bowl, these can be scattered over green beans tossed in olive oil or atop a baked potato. Use the blooms in all the ways you would use traditional chive leaves, basically. Finally, some trendy edible flowers which actually have great flavour.

Email James at james.wong@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @Botanygeek