Landscape architect and author Jennifer Bartley couldn’t make healthy eating look any easier.

Want a delicious, fresh spring salad for lunch? Simply go outside to the kitchen garden and pick a bunch of kale, lettuce and other annual greens — and don’t forget some herbs and edible flowers.

“Spring is the time many perennial herbs are reappearing,” she says, “so I love to harvest young mint leaves, tarragon leaves and borage flowers. Other edible flowers like nasturtium, calendula and scarlet runner bean are lovely to add as well.”

Even spring’s colorful pansies are suitable for eating, she says.

“You just need to know what chemicals have been sprayed on them, so best to grow your own. Red clover flowers are edible, but usually best dried and used for tea.”

Creating a successful “potager” garden — a term borrowed from the French meaning “for the soup pot” — is more involved than randomly planting in the backyard. Bartley, who lives in Granville, Ohio and has taught at Ohio State University, offers design plans, plant profiles, growing tips, and even recipes, in her latest book, “The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook” (Timber Press, $22.95), which follows her last work, “Designing the New Kitchen Garden.”

Time for planting

She says it’s not too early now to plant cool season plants like kale, beets, onions and broccoli, as they will tolerate frost, but plan on covering them if it gets really cold. She advises home gardeners to wait until after May 15 to plant beans, tomatoes, basil and peppers.

Bartley will discuss how to design a kitchen garden that is both useful and beautiful as one of the speakers at the 24th annual Garden and Landscape Symposium of Western Pennsylvania on April 27 at Shady Side Academy Senior School in Fox Chapel.

The symposium presented by Penn State Extension provides expert speakers that will share their knowledge of interesting topics to home gardeners and horticulture professionals.

Perennials: What’s new

Other presenters include keynote speaker Tony Avent, plantsman and owner of Plant Delights, a mail-order and retail nursery in Raleigh, N.C., specializing in rare and unusual perennials and North American native plants. His topics will include “Planting in Drifts of One” and “Perennials: What’s new and exciting, overlooked — variations thereof.”

With a degree in horticultural science from North Carolina State University and a love of gardening since he was a boy, Avent specializes in doing research on new plants at his nursery and at nearby Juniper Level Botanic Garden, a process that often takes him 10 years or more.

“People ask why it takes so long to trial plants,” he says. “We need to make sure it will be a long-term plant (under all conditions). Everybody wants a quick fix, but you can’t have that in evaluating plants.”

Among his pet peeves are nurseries that provide misleading details about Zone Hardiness on plant labels.

“I see so much bad information on Zone Hardiness it makes me want to cringe,” he says. “When they say a plant is appropriate for Zones 3 to 9, that’d be from Duluth, Minn., to Orlando, Fla. Very few plants do well in both places.”

Urban forest conservation

Also speaking at the Garden and Landscape Symposium will be Cynthia Morton, a researcher with Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and Curator of Botany at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. She has worked locally and internationally on projects including investigating park and nursery tree genetics. Her presentation will focus on “Conservation of Our Urban Forest Health.”

Vincent Cotrone, a regional urban forester and educator for Penn State University, will give a presentation on “Green Gardens, Clean Water: Managing Rain Where It Falls.”

The symposium also will feature a Garden Marketplace open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. offering annuals, perennials, fruit and vegetable plants and shrubs for sale, as well as garden books, tools and accessories. The Garden Marketplace is located in the indoor Ice Arena on the Shady Side AcademySenior School campus.

The Daffodil and Hosta Society of Western Pennsylvania will hold its annual Daffodil Show at the Marketplace, with national and local ribbons to be awarded.

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