Do you want to grow a garden that is not only beautiful, but packed with edible blooms for you and the pollinators? Planting flowers is one of the easiest ways to attract pollinators and create a thriving ecosystem right in your backyard. Whether you’re growing vegetables, herbs, or just creating a beautiful landscape, these 6 flowers are the perfect addition to any garden.

1. Yarrow

Yarrow is a beautiful flower that is not only good for pollinators, but also beneficial for you. It attracts ladybugs and lacewings, which will keep your vegetables safe from harmful insects. The aroma of yarrow can also repel certain pests, so it’s especially useful when planted directly next to your vegetable plants. Their deep roots can gather nutrients from the subsoil, allowing you to restore beneficial nutrients to your vegetable garden each year. Yarrow also has incredible medicinal benefits and is known to have wound healing, digestion, and immune supporting properties. Yarrow is a perennial flower, so it will come back year after year and you and your garden can continue to reap the benefits without any extra work. If you’re looking for a flower with high medicinal value, you can’t go wrong with adding yarrow to your garden.

2. Chamomile

Chamomile is one of our favorite flowers to grow in our garden because it’s one of our favorite teas to drink. It’s an easy to grow flower that smells like apples while it blooms and it is so easy to preserve for tea. Chamomile is known for its calming properties and is often used to reduce stress, aid digestion, and improve sleep. It also has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties, which some believe can benefit surrounding plants. It’s a great companion plant, especially for brassicas, onions, cucumbers, and herbs. It’s a favorite for pollinators, especially bees and hoverflies. While it’s not a perennial, it does self-seed easily and has grown on its own in my garden for several years. If you want to enjoy home grown tea or just want some beautiful aromas coming from your garden, chamomile is an easy addition to any space.

To see our experience with growing chamomile, visit our Chamomile Grow Diary.

3. Echinacea

Purple coneflower, also known as echinacea, is a beautiful perennial plant that is another of our favorites for tea. Echinacea has immune boosting properties, so we love to keep the flower petals on hand for when we have a cold. Echinacea root is also very useful medicinally, though you need a plant that is at least 3 years old before harvesting. This flower is also a pollinator favorite. We have two echinacea plants in our front yard and we usually have 15-20 bees on it at any time during the day. Echinacea is long blooming, so you and the pollinators can enjoy this flower for most of the summer. They are also drought tolerant and self-seed easily. If you’re looking for a long-lasting flower that requires almost no effort, echinacea is a fantastic choice to add to your garden.

4. Sunflowers

Sunflowers are well loved for their beautiful blooms, but they are also an essential tool in your garden space. They have very long roots, which helps bring nutrients from your subsoil up (if you chop and drop the sunflower stalks). They also detoxify your soil by absorbing heavy metals. Sunflower stalks are extremely sturdy and can be used as a living trellis for things like beans. You can also cut down the stalks and dry them out to use as a trellis. Some varieties can grow several feet tall, so sunflowers are a great option for a temporary living fence. You can also eat sunflowers, both the seeds and the flower head. We leave some of the sunflower heads for the birds to enjoy and they easily reseed each year. Since they reseed easily, make sure to plant them in a space where you don’t mind having sunflowers for years to come. There are a ton of varieties of sunflowers, so pick a few to try out.

5. Marigold

Marigolds are one of the most important flowers in our vegetable garden. It repels aphids and whiteflies and is a fantastic companion plant for a variety of vegetables including tomatoes, peppers, beans, and brassicas. We always plant a marigold next to our tomato plants and it has helped us reduce the number of pests every year. Marigolds thrive in poor soil and can handle full sun, so they’re easy to add in next to small vegetable plants to protect them early on. Marigolds are also very easy to collect seeds from, so you won’t need to buy seeds or young plants every year.

6. Cosmos

Cosmos are one of our favorite annual flowers to plant each year. They are very well loved by pollinators, including hummingbirds. We enjoy watching the birds and butterflies circle around these beautiful blooms almost every day in the summer. They are very low maintenance and easy to grow. They make beautiful cut flowers when you want a floral arrangement to give to a friend or to add as decor in your home. Cosmos are also very easy to collect seeds from and they may even self seed if you let the flowers dry out on the stalk. There are so many different colored cosmos you can grow, so try out several and see what you like best. Don’t forget to save the seeds from your favorite ones.

Start adding flowers to your vegetable garden

Planting flowers in your vegetable garden will add so much beauty to your home and offer a ton of benefits to you, the pollinators, and your garden space. To learn more about how flowers can benefit your vegetable garden, visit How Flowers Can Increase Your Garden Harvest and Boost Your Garden’s Health. While these six flowers are our favorite to add to our garden space, any flower will benefit you and your garden. Visit a local garden store and pick out a few different types of flowers to try growing. There are flowers you can plant in almost any season, so there’s never a bad time to start planting them.

6 Essential Flowers Every Gardener Should Add to Their Vegetable Garden