Long ago I used to have a bad attitude about ornamentals. I looked at flower gardening as an indulgence, without the necessity attached to growing plants to eat. That has changed and I now not only admire beautiful gardens, but I have great respect for the gardeners who create them. Nevertheless, I’m a hungry man, so it’s mainly the vegetable garden for me. If I had more time, I would dabble in the artsy, but now I barely have time to secure the harvest.
Edible plants almost all produce flowers to attract pollinators. Some of these flowers are tiny or not even recognizable as a flower, but many can be every bit as gorgeous as the wildest exotics of the flower garden.
I took a walk through the garden today and shot these:
Bolted and flowering cilantro and dill bordering a strawberry bed. These plants attract dozens of different pollinators.
A wasp on cilantro flowers with a bee in the background.
Bumblebees don’t rest long enough to make it easy to get a shot. The big farms are complaining of the loss of pollinators. It’s the lack of biodiversity, that and the use of pesticides. If they started farming the right way the bees would come.
A potato plant in bloom.
A trellised melon plant
Waltham Butternut Squash
Oregano
Corn tassels, the male pollinator of corn flowers.
Arugula bolted and flowering in the garlic bed.
A little zuke, with the flower showing us where the next one is coming from.
Get close to a tomato blossom and it looks like a little sunflower.
Pepper blossoms mostly droop down and stay out of the sun.
Eggplant blooms truly rival ornamentals in beauty.