Once upon a time I watched something peculiar at the garden centre.
A woman bought arrowhead for her pond. Sagittaria sagittifolia. Member of the Alismataceae family.
Arrow-shaped leaves, white flowers with purple centres. Six quid. “Adds visual interest to water features,” the label said.
Earlier in the year I had been at an Asian supermarket. Same plant. Different aisle. Food section. £4.95 per 250g. Labelled 慈姑 in Chinese. OK it’s actually a different species but used the same way as our native version.
One marketed for looking at. One marketed for eating. Both accurate descriptions of the same plant.
The garden centre version sits in your pond looking decorative whilst the Asian market version, well, the tubers are fried with soy sauce, aromatics, sugar until they’re sweet and nutty. Added to winter soups.
The tubers are starchy, slightly bitter, filling and bland, but they possess a remarkable ability to absorb liquids and fats without disintegrating.
For centuries, arrowhead was food. Evidence goes back to the paleolithic and mesolithic era. Native Americans harvested it. Still cultivated across China, Japan, Korea. The cooked leaves are edible too.
But somewhere between Victorian ornamental gardens and modern landscaping, we forgot. We split plants into two categories. Pretty or useful. Never looked back.
Now we walk past edible plants every single day, seeing only “ornamentals”.
Why this matters?
Your perception determines what you see. If you think ponds grow nothing but mosquitoes and algae, you’ll never kneel at the water’s edge and pull up dinner. If you think ornamental means inedible, you’ll pay six quid for a plant you could eat.
The knowledge isn’t lost. It’s just filed in the wrong category.
Once you know arrowhead is both beautiful and edible, you start seeing other plants differently.
The categories we inherit shape what we notice. Change the category, change what you see.
All plants are equal. Your ancestors didn’t separate ornamental from edible.
Neither should you.
‘Foraging law‘ says this:
“It is illegal to uproot any wild plant without landowners permission”