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Colourful and Tasty Salads: Add a Touch of Whimsy to Your Plate!
Choosing planting

Colourful and Tasty Salads: Add a Touch of Whimsy to Your Plate!

Our selection of crunchy leaves and edible flowers

Contents

Modified the 7 January 2026  by Pascale 4 min.

In spring, but especially in summer, we often want to add freshness to our plates. And the essential salad delights our taste buds as much as our eyes. Composed of leaves from various green salads, freshly picked from the vegetable garden, combined with cherry tomatoes, sliced peppers, or a few leaves of aromatic herbs, all enhanced with a light vinaigrette, it is perfect for starting (or finishing) a meal with a touch of lightness.

To make this salad even more beautiful and tasty, you can enrich it with some edible flowers or diversify it with other equally green leaves to add crunch.

Preparing a summer salad, enriched with flowers or slightly unusual vegetables, is a way to experience new flavours and open up a new culinary world.

Discover our colourful and crunchy suggestions to jazz up your summer salads.

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The base of any colourful summer salad, the green of the leaves.

When it comes to summer salad, it’s all about green salad. In the vegetable garden, spring and summer see the salad in full swing. Whether you love the tenderness of a beautiful lettuce leaf, the crunch of a chicory leaf, the delicacy of an oak leaf, or the bitterness of a curly chicory, everyone can enjoy these green salads. One can greatly vary the pleasures as the varieties are numerous:

  • The lettuce (Lactuca sativa) is often found on every table as it adds a touch of flair: butterhead lettuce is all about roundness, batavia with its blistered leaves brings crunch, just like romaine lettuce, while cut lettuce offers ease of use. What could be better than a few leaves of Pierre-Bénite batavia lettuce with its nutty flavour, paired with some bright red, curly leaves of Lollo Rossa, mixed with the smooth, thick leaves of a Fat Lazy Blonde?
  • The curly chicory (Cichorium endivia crispum) also carves out a niche in summer salads with its pure white heart. Thus, the Meaux curly chicory will withstand the heat.
  • Chicory escarole (Cichorium endivia var.latifolium) can also join the garden in summer, particularly the Grosse bouclée or the Géante maraîchère.
  • As for rocket (Eruca sativa), it adds a slightly peppery flavour, particularly the cultivated rocket which can be sown from March to August.colourful summer salad

Then, in summer, you can also add some rapidly growing lamb’s lettuce like the remarkable Palace lamb’s lettuce which can be sown from January to September for a harvest throughout the year.

To keep it simple, you can also just grow mesclun salads made up of mixed young shoots.

For further reading, discover my selection of 15 salads for summer.

Read also

Salads: buyer's guide

Add some colour to your salads with edible flowers.

Flowers abound in your garden. All more colourful or fragrant than the others, flowers bring cheer to the smallest bed or pot. They also generously offer their nectar and pollen to foraging and pollinating insects. These insects can be quite generous, leaving you a few petals to enjoy.

Some flowers are indeed edible and can enhance our salads in the most beautiful way! They add a touch of whimsy to our plates while imparting surprising flavours, sometimes explosive, often delicate. Not to mention the nutritional benefits they contain.

A small, non-exhaustive selection of flowers to add to your summer salads:

  • Borage (Borago officinalis) is a must with its little blue flowers (remove the peduncles) with a pronounced briny taste. Best grown in the vegetable garden or in a flower bed.
  • Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) in various colours has a hint of black radish or watercress, initially sweet then peppery. It is a fast-growing climber that will adorn all supports throughout the summer.
  • Mallow (Malva silvestris) offers its purple-veined flowers against a pink mauve background. Its petals add a lot of softness to your summer salads.
  • Centaury or cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) blooms in blue between May and July and adds a honey-like, slightly spicy note to your salads.
  • Marigold (Calendula officinalis) is a plant with multiple uses from which you can, among other things, make a cosmetic oil. The yellow or orange flowers can sprinkle a salad with colour. Its flavour, reminiscent of saffron, will surprise you!
  • Pineapple sage ‘Golden Delicious’: the bright red flowers of this pineapple sage burst in spikes in October and November. Perfect for extending summer flavours into autumn.
  • Daylily lilioasphodelus: this botanical daylily is first planted for the beauty of its large lemon-yellow flowers with the scent of orange blossom. You can also incorporate these ephemeral flowers into a summer salad, as well as into fruit salads, desserts, sorbets… The flowers of the ‘Buttercup’ variety are also delicious.
  • Wild chicory (Cichorium intybus) stands out with its sky-blue flowers (in summer). It is a herbaceous perennial, very common in northern France, that thrives in full sun. Use it sparingly, as the flavour is strong.

To discover more flowers to incorporate into your salads, I invite you to read Virginie D.’s article: 18 edible flowers to sow or plant in your garden.

These vegetable plants that can also be eaten in salads

To add a bit of greenery to your salads, opt for these vegetable or herb plants that, depending on your moods and desires, bring diversity and sometimes a splash of colour. Often characterised by strong flavours, these vegetable plants are all quite simple to sow or plant.

Here’s a selection of plants to choose for their young tender and tasty leaves:

  • Blood sorrel (Rumex sanguineus) is a variety of sorrel with light green leaves veined in red. It adds a tangy note to summer salads from May to August.
  • Spinach ‘America’: this variety of spinach is characterised by its deeply green, crinkled leaves. Raw, the spinach leaves have a delicate nutty flavour.
  • Curly kale ‘Westlandse Winter’: this semi-dwarf kale offers abundant foliage that can be enjoyed like spinach, either raw or cooked. It will also extend the pleasures of summer on your plate as it can be harvested from October to February. Its leaves can be cut as needed.
  • Purslane (Portulaca oleracea): this is a creeping fleshy herb with very crunchy leaves and a mild flavour. To add colour, choose a variety with golden foliage.
  • Watercress: this vegetable and condiment plant offers leaves with a peppery or even spicy flavour. We distinguish garden cress (Lepidium sativum) from watercress (Nasturtium officinale), which grows with its roots in water.
  • Chard or beet (Beta vulgaris): the leaves of this vegetable, whose stalks are also consumed, can be eaten raw in a salad, just like spinach leaves.

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Colourful salads and edible flowers