Yay! My favourite salad flower started producing today. It’s peach-leaved bellflower (Campanula persicifolia), but since that’s a bit of a mouthful we usually call it salad bluebell. (Campanulas are called bluebells in Scotland. The plant that they call bluebell in England is pretty poisonous. This is why Latin names are so good!) It has a mild taste and the flowers are large and produced in abundance between now and the first frost. This means that it can be used as a bulk salad ingredient, so from this time of year our salads generally turn blue.

The whole Campanula genus is edible and further south I’m told that C versicolor tastes nicest, but persicifolia is thoroughly hardy and thrives in Aberdeen, which is what I look for in a plant.

Photo from Wikipedia Commons, with thanks to Pixeltoo.