Feature: Aussies warming up to edible flowers

Australia's gastronomy is being revolutionized by the sights of colourful and pretty looking edible flowers.

An Australian edible flower producer Pretty Produce owner Simone Jelley tells Xinhua that more Australians were slowly warming up to having flowers appear on their cakes or salads like never before.

"The Chinese have been eating edible flowers for many years and culturally China eats a lot of flowers... but for the west, it's just begun," she said.

Jelley who grows a range of about 45 to 50 edible flowers in her three-acre farm on Lamb Island in Moreton Bay, Queensland said she plans to export her produce to Hong Kong in the coming days and has already initiated contact.

"We are the top five producer of edible flowers in Australia and I am really interested to export," she said.

Jelley, a former press photographer, got into the edible flowers business by chance in 2012 and only decided to go commercial in October 2015.

"We started out with the idea of a kitchen garden that went out of control when I discovered what was edible," she said.

"Prior to that, I never had a garden before."

Though the business is still in its infancy stage, Jelley said the edible flower business had enormous potential for growth with some 80,000 edible flowers species worldwide that has yet to be tapped.

"It's what I would call an evolution of a farming practice as well, there is still a lot of data that can be developed on edible flowers which is still not out there," she said.

Jelley explained that more research is being done to find out the health benefits that comes with eating edible flowers, as at the moment not much is known in this space.

For now, she is trying to get the word around that edible flowers can be made into beautiful pieces of rice paper rolls or weaved into a topping of crunchy biscuit.

"Some people are scared to eat edible flowers because they are just so beautiful," she said, laughing.

On the taste, Jelley said it varied from being sweet to bitter, adding that some people think that edible flower tasted "like weird lecture."

Jelley currently grows a range of edible flowers such as marigolds, zinnias, pansies, fennel and dill flowers which mostly appears on plates in restaurant venues from Brisbane right up to Melbourne. Enditem