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Edible Native Plants from the Wildlife Garden

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Highbush Blueberry

Native blueberries are delicious and nutritious for wildlife and people. Image courtesy American Beauties Native Plants.

This upcoming weekend, our native plant nursery will be a vendor at the 25th annual Baltimore Herb Festival. Of course we spend a lot of time thinking about which of our native plants will be good food for wildlife, but for this event we want to focus on telling people that many plants in their wildlife garden are edible too.

In many ways, the poster child for edible native plants is the blueberry. Here in Maryland we have many native species of blueberry, including the incredibly versatile northern highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). Blueberries are incredibly healthy for humans, of course, and readers of Doug Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home know that plants in the genus Vaccinium are host to nearly 300 different species of butterfly and moth caterpillars.

Native fruit plants are not at all common, it turns out. The list of plants that produce edible native fruit for both humans and wildlife includes elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), pawpaw (Asmina triloba), persimmon (Diospyros virginiana), black chokeberry (Photinia melanocarpa), and many others.

New Jersey tea, for pollinators and patriots. Image via flickr (Some rights reserved by cotinis)

One of my favorite native plants for home landscapes is New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus), a compact shrub that tolerates hot dry sites, is unsurprisingly also edible. I plant it primarily because the flowers of this plant are a magnet for small pollinators in early summer and is an important larval host for butterflies like the Spring Azure (Celastrina laden). But the leaves can be dried and made into – you guessed it – tea that is tasty and also has some medicinal properties [PDF].

Regular readers know that another one of my favorite native plants is Anise-scented goldenrod (Solidago odora), which is a valuable late-summer nectar source for butterflies and which also sports leaves that have a distinct fragrance of licorice. This goldenrod – also called “sweet goldenrod – is the state herb of Delaware and has a “patriotic” history: According to The Herb Companion:

Sweet goldenrod, sometimes called blue mountain tea, has a rich history. Long before the ­arrival of Europeans, the Native Americans so appreciated its taste that they flavored other medicinals with it. After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, patriotic colonists devised a substitute for China tea called Liberty Tea, made from equal parts of sweet goldenrod, betony, red clover, and New Jersey tea ­(Ceanothus americanus). Later, sweet goldenrod became a cash crop in the United States; it was even exported to China, where it sold at high prices as a tea ­substitute.

Even spicebush (Lindera benzoin), that wonderfully deer-resistant and swallowtail-hosting plant, can be made into an excellent tea as can many of our lovely bee-friendly edible native mints (like Monarda and Pycnanthemum).

Anise-scented goldenrod

Anise-scented goldenrod is important for butterflies, and is a versatile herb or tea ingredient too.

Man cannot leave on tea alone, however, so how about some cooked greens? According to Peterson’s A Field Guide of Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America, plants like common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) and stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) are usually considered unpalatable but when shoots,  young stems are collected (carefully!) and boiled these plants are quite tasty. Even young milkweed seed pods are edible! Just be sure to plant enough that your Monarchs and Red Admiral caterpillars have some to eat too.

I must admit that I garden primarily for wildlife and don’t often take advantages of all the edible native plants that are growing in my yard. But I have lots of clients who want to both garden for wildlife AND become a little bit more self-reliant, and they take comfort in knowing that those are not mutually exclusive aims.

© 2012, Vincent Vizachero. All rights reserved. This article is the property of Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us


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