Borago officinalis is an odd plant which is so friendly with it’s fresh and spicy cucumber tasting leaves and honey flavoured flowers while attracting excessive numbers of bees to your whole garden and yet simultaneously fighting you off with it’s unpleasantly hairy prickly external texture.
The fresh taste of the leaves is quite pleasant but they really need to be chopped and either mashed or squashed in some way to reduce the ‘mouth feel’ of the hairy surface texture. But they can be cooked and are often used in soups. They are an interesting combo with Basil.
The flowers have a slight honey back flavour – very nice for adding to all sorts of culinary items as decoration. Dusting them with icing sugar is a nice way to enhance the experience.
Usually the flowers are a luminous sky blue but there is also a white variant – both grow and taste the same – and the bees seem to be just as attracted to them both. They are excellent plants to grow just to get the pollinators into your garden spaces for working on your other edible plants to make sure your yields are as high as possible.
The plants are usually about up to 1 metre high and will often flop over if not staked up or contained. They self seed and germinate easily and it’s worth letting them do their thing in a permanent position rather than try to collect the seed. The seedlings transplant well when small.
The plants like lots of moist soil to grow rapidly, but seem to also last quite well in a fairly dry environment with intermittent watering once established for the season. Because they are soft annuals they can die back suddenly, but will regrown from any seed at all left on the plant. As long as they have some ripe fruits on them the seed will reemerge in spring some time after their demise in late winter – so it’s worth leaving the waste plants lying about for surface composting in place to let any seed drop.