One of the tastiest snacks, grown for beauty in the garden, is the daylily, native to eastern Asia but commonly planted all over the world for its gorgeous flowers. Most daylilies are orange or bright lemon yellow, but red and multi-colored cultivars brighten millions of gardens the world over.The daylily is an extremely low-maintenance ornamental. Once it gets established in your garden, it will persist for decades whether you pay much attention to it or not. Indeed, in parts of North America it has become a common roadside weed. So don’t plant it unless you are sure you want it.The daylily plant produces not one but two delightful food items. One is the flower, or more precisely, the flower buds. You can buy dried daylily buds in Chinese groceries, but fresh ones are much better. Each flower blooms for only one day. You go out and pick the full-sized buds set to bloom the next day. Toss them in a frying-pan with a bit of butter and some chopped onions, or put them in a stew or a casserole. There are many possibilities. They are sort of like green beans, but with a special flavor all their own.Underground, the same plant produces tubers. These are small and white, maybe a centimetre or two long, but one plant can be harboring dozens of them, especially if the plant has been there a while. Digging them up actually helps the plant by loosening the soil and spreading the colony out a bit. Wash the tubers, pick off the roots, and cook like tiny potatoes. They taste rather like sweet corn.
One word of caution: pick these only from your own garden where you know they have not been sprayed with any nasty pesticides.Image: Haslam Photography, John L Richbourg and Evgeniya Uvarova/Shutterstock