Ornamental and Edible Fruits

You don’t need to sacrifice beauty to grow a few edibles in your landscape. Many ornamental plants grown for their beauty also produce edible fruit.

Juneberries are one of my favorites.  Beautiful spring flowers, good fall color, smooth gray bark and tasty fruit you and the birds will enjoy.  They remind me of nutty blueberries and are great eaten fresh or baked into a pie or muffins.

Cornelian cherry dogwood produces showy yellow flowers in early spring followed by bright red fruit in summer.  You will need to add a bit of sugar, well for me a lot, but these are great in jams, jelly and wine.

The ornamental elderberries are quite popular.  Harvest a few of their berries to make some elderberry jam, jelly and of course wine for those more ambitious gardeners.

Go vertical with hardy kiwis.  Arctic beauty has green with cream and pink blotches and the female plants produce grape-size tasty kiwis.  Most kiwis need at least one male for every 5 female plants to produce the tasty fruit.

A bit more information:  Or try using edible plants in place of ornamentals in your landscape. Raspberries, currants and gooseberries can be used for hedges.  Grapes make a nice covering for arbors and pergolas.  And, of course, apples, peaches, plums and other fruit trees can be used as ornamental landscape trees, while providing fruit for you and your family to enjoy.

Tags

serviceberry kiwi cornelian-cherry-dogwood american-elder black-elder

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