What are your Top 10 Favorite Plants?

Hello!

We are starting our own little landscape design business (we are calling it Easy Edible Edens, and we are focusing on perennials) and I am trying to compile a list of plants that I can use as "go-to's." Can you offer any suggestions? Even if you don't do your top ten, one or two would be great!

Thanks!

Horseradish
Rhubarb
Jerusalem Artichoke
Spearmint
Lemon Balm
Sage
Rosemary
Filbert Hazelnut
Clover
Dandelions


Next year I'll try Oca as well

My new favorite perennial is kosmic kale. I ate from it 3xs a day all summer and am dehydrating it now as fast as I can.

Several edibles are quite sculptural. Mountain ash, mulberry and many nuts can work in a formal landscape. Salal, Oregon Grape, and blueberries can replace other hedging and ground cover.

Chilean guava/ New Zealand cranberry makes a fine hedge or an attractive freestanding shrub.

In any guild
comfrey
yarrow
clovers, all types
cosmos
Egyptian walking onions
Temperate guild
Currents, all colours
wild strawberries, red and white
Mediterranean guild
Globe artichokes
Mediterranean herbs like sage, oregano, rosemary
field poppies

Off the top of my head:
1. Fennel because it looks great and attracts so many insects and birds eat the seeds
2. Daubenton’s kale / ‘other kales left to perennialise’, easy greens and in particular the variegated Daubenton’s is very pretty.
3. Three cornered leek because it is really early and very beautiful. In the US you may not have this, but your ramps would be something like it.
4. Welsh onion or if you don’t have that in the US, tree onions.
5. Blackcurrants – so easy and tasty!
6. Jostaberries – even easier and more productive!
7. Earth nut pea – a small tuber which I am allowing to have more than one year in the ground before harvesting to give it a chance to bulk up a little. But the flowers are amazing and it fixes nitrogen and feeds the insects.
8. Yacon – very reliable harvests.
9. Field beans – sold as green manure but I grow them to eat. Indistinguishable to me from broad beans, very hardy and easy. Bees like the flowers and fixes nitrogen.
10. Lamb’s lettuce – self seeding and early

1 Rosemary
mosquito repellent qualities, drought and neglect resistant, can be sculpted, delicious in soups and stews.

2 Purple Basil
Colorful, gets bushier the more you pick it, dries easily for storage, can't make pesto without it.

3 Hubbard Squash
The worlds best squash. Nothing wrong with a vine 20 feet long with leaves the size of dinner plates and fruits that wont fit into a 5 gallon bucket.

4 Lettuce
Comes in every color of the rainbow, lots of shapes and sizes, bend over and graze.

5 Garlic
There is no such thing as too much garlic.

6 Red Russian Kale
Green, purple, pink, all on one leaf. Will grow 4-5 feet tall in the right conditions with long, wide, frilled leaves. Virtually no limit to culinary uses.

7 Ground Cherry
Ornamental, fruit form in papery husks, ready to eat when they fall off, tasty.

8 Collards
When 4 leaves is enough to fill a pot, you've got a giant plant. Pick and come again. Takes a frost.

9 Spaghetti Tree
Just wait until harvest season

10 Beets
Because beet greens and bacon is the best thing and thats all there is to it.

Anni Kelsey wrote:Off the top of my head:
1. Fennel because it looks great and attracts so many insects and birds eat the seeds
2. Daubenton’s kale / ‘other kales left to perennialise’, easy greens and in particular the variegated Daubenton’s is very pretty.
3. Three cornered leek because it is really early and very beautiful. In the US you may not have this, but your ramps would be something like it.
4. Welsh onion or if you don’t have that in the US, tree onions.
5. Blackcurrants – so easy and tasty!
6. Jostaberries – even easier and more productive!
7. Earth nut pea – a small tuber which I am allowing to have more than one year in the ground before harvesting to give it a chance to bulk up a little. But the flowers are amazing and it fixes nitrogen and feeds the insects.
8. Yacon – very reliable harvests.
9. Field beans – sold as green manure but I grow them to eat. Indistinguishable to me from broad beans, very hardy and easy. Bees like the flowers and fixes nitrogen.
10. Lamb’s lettuce – self seeding and early

^^^good ones =) ^^^
i like you added the three cornered leek, allium triquetrum, i am quite fond of it as well, but i discovered its a much hated "weed" to many people, though i cant imagine why since its so nice, IMO.

agreed the earliness of it makes it even more appreciated, in nor cal its at its peak time in december-february, when most everything else is fading away. i've also discovered this makes it a animal/hummingbird favorite, because its abundant when nothing much is around. i was kinda amazed to see how many hummingbirds were all over it.

and oo i so what to play but too many plants come to mind to do a top ten right now. i will think on it maybe post later =)