Liz’s Allotment Life: Perennial vegetables in Norway

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a passionate advocate for perennial

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

vegetables. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I recently travelled to Norway to learn more about these plants and their potential for more sustainable food growing.

Norway seemed the obvious place to go: its home to Stephen Barstow, an incredibly knowledgeable advocate for perennial vegetables who has worked with them for many years.

Rather disconcertingly, the first place you pass through after leaving Trondheim airport is a town called 'Hell', a name derived from the Old Norse hellir, meaning 'shelter beneath a cliff'. Thankfully the next three days were anything but hellish – they were eye-opening and got me thinking about how we could grow food differently here in the UK. So, having hinted at the trip last time, I thought it was time to tell you a little more about what I discovered.

My tour began at Ringve Botanic Garden, on the edge of a fjord in Trondheim. I was lucky enough to have a tour of the gardens with the curator, who showed me the impressive range of plants able to grow in this challenging climate, where temperatures can fall to around -20°C.

I then met up with Stephen Barstow to explore the Chicago Onion Garden, a collection that celebrates the diversity of perennial

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

Allium species. The name ‘Chicago’ comes from an Indigenous American word meaning ‘stinking place in the woods’, referring to the perennial onions that once grew abundantly in the area where the city now stands.

The Chicago Onion Garden

Interestingly, the familiar bulb onion, Allium cepa, is generally grown as an annual or biennial

Biennials are plants that complete their life cycle over the course of two years. In the first year, biennials typically produce leaves and roots but no flowers. In the second year, they flower and produce seeds before dying. Some common biennials include foxgloves Digitalis, honesty Lunaria annua and viper's bugloss Echium vulgare.

crop, whereas many other alliums can persist and produce year after year.

Temperatures regularly reach -20°C, while the nearby fjord creates freeze-thaw conditions and without a consistent layer of insulating snow, the soil can freeze deeply, yet according to Stephen, Trondheim is one of the best places to grow alliums. He uses pheromone traps to control leek moth, while there is some rust, but little else causes significant problems due to the climate. Many perennial alliums have edible leaves, flowers, bulbils or scapes, making them particularly versatile plants.

Some of my favourites included:

• Nodding onion (Allium cernuum): this stays green throughout winter and is possibly one of the hardiest alliums. It acted as a survival food when Europeans first arrived in North America
• Victory onion (Allium victorialis): with much broader leaves than many alliums, this species is also grown as a food crop and is sold commercially in Japan
• Siberian chives (Allium nutans): this has broad leaves, curvy stems and is an important food plant in Siberia
• Tall allium (Allium hymenorhizum): one of the tallest species, reaching around 1.2m

Allium nutans at the Chicago Onion Garden

From the botanic garden, we visited a fjord-side community garden (Væres Venner Community garden at Ranheim in Trondheim) where plot holders follow strict environmental rules, including a ban on plastics. This means no synthetic netting over brassicas and no horticultural fleece – yet the crops were still managing to grow, and the broad beans were particularly impressive.

At the centre of the site was the World Garden (Verdenshagen), a circular collection of around 250 perennial

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

vegetables arranged according to their geographical origins. I found this particularly interesting because it demonstrates the huge diversity of perennial food crops available around the world, as well as their potential role in regional food security in a country that currently imports much of its fresh produce.

The World Garden (Verdenshagen)

Some of the highlights included: 

• Stingless nettle (Urtica dioica subsp. galeopsifolia): A nettle with long, narrow leaves and very little sting.
• Cabbage thistle (Cirsium oleraceum): The young top shoots can be eaten as greens. Like many thistles, it is extremely hardy, supports biodiversity
  

  The variety of living organisms (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) in a particular environment. Boosting the biodiversity of your garden has many benefits, including supporting wildlife, improving soil health and reducing the likelihood of pest and disease problems.

  and can provide food for us.
• Perennial lettuce (Lactuca perennis): Produces mild-tasting leaves and attractive blue flowers, while remaining hardy through winter.
• Roseroot (Rhodiola rosea): An arctic native
  

  A native plant is one that originated or arrived naturally in a particular place without human involvement. In the British Isles, native plants are those that were here during the last ice age or have arrived unaided since.

  with edible shoots and roots however they are hard to harvest without damaging the plant. 
• Ligularia fischeri: A popular spring vegetable in Korea, L. fisherii produces edible young growth and can flower at different times depending on the variety. Only this species should be eaten, however, so it is important to identify it correctly.

Roseroot (Rhodiola rosea)

Stephen describes his home garden as a wild garden that he is gradually rewilding – stepping back and letting nature to take control. Over the decades he has grown more than 2,000 edible plants on the site, and has recently stopped weeding, allowing plants to compete in a kind of ‘survival of the fittest’. Some of the smaller, less productive plants have disappeared, while others have thrived and outcompeted what we might traditionally regard as weeds.

Despite this hands-off approach, Stephen still harvests more food than he can eat, particularly in spring. For him, the garden has become less about trying to control nature and more about being part of the system. His main intervention is simply keeping the surrounding forest from encroaching too far.

This light-touch approach has also created a remarkably biodiverse garden. Since 2020, 330 moth species have been recorded here, reflecting the diversity of plants available for their caterpillars, many of which are specific about the species they feed on. The abundance of perennial flowers also provides nectar

Sweet liquid mainly produced by flowers to attract pollinators. Honeybees make honey from nectar.

for bees, hoverflies and other insects. It is a fascinating example of a garden that can be both highly productive and nature-friendly without biodiversity

The variety of living organisms (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) in a particular environment. Boosting the biodiversity of your garden has many benefits, including supporting wildlife, improving soil health and reducing the likelihood of pest and disease problems.

being its sole purpose.

As expected, there were plenty of unusual edible plants to discover. Some of my favourites included:

• Japanese vine: A fully hardy Japanese vine scrambles up a yew tree beside the house. Although it does not fruit, its leaves can be used in cooking. Stephen also demonstrated his knowledge of traditional uses of yew, although this is a plant where extreme caution is needed: the seeds are highly toxic.
• Ground elder: Often treated as an unwelcome weed, ground elder provides useful salad greens throughout the summer.
• Seakale (Crambe maritima): The oldest plant in the garden is around 40 years old and remains highly productive. It’s mulched each year with seaweed, while the young shoots are harvested for eating.
• Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis): The seeds of this plant can be used as a tasty addition to bread.

The Oenothera is Stephen's private garden

With so many unusual ingredients growing around him – many of which won't be found in conventional recipe books – Stephen doesn't follow recipes particularly closely. Instead, he uses what he calls ‘jazz cooking’: starting with the basic idea of a recipe and improvising with whatever happens to be ready to harvest.

The plants I saw in Norway should all be suitable for growing in the UK, provided their individual preferences for soil, light and growing conditions are taken into account. The bigger challenge is getting hold of them.

Some perennial

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

vegetables are readily available, such as Jerusalem artichokes, while others are easy to find even though they are more commonly sold as ornamentals than edibles – hostas, for example. For more specialist plants, nurseries such as Incredible Vegetables, Otter Farm and Edulis are useful sources. However, demand often exceeds supply, so it pays to be organised and order early, as plants can sell out quickly.

Other crops are much harder to source in the UK. Some of the perennial alliums, for example, can be particularly difficult to find. Hopefully, as the benefits of perennial vegetables become more widely recognised, they will become easier to source.

Allium Cernuum in the Chicago Onion Garden

In the meantime, enjoy experimenting with the plants you can find, and always buy edible plants from reputable suppliers. Correct identification is particularly important when you are growing plants to eat.

I currently have around 15–20 different plants on my allotment that I would class as perennial vegetables, and I’m trying to increase this collection. Their general resilience to our changing climate really appeals to me, and I’ve set myself a challenge: to see whether, in a few years’ time, I can supply all the leafy greens in my diet from perennial vegetables. It should be more than possible!

With the weather finally cooling down and some rain softening the soil, next week I’ll be sharing tips on autumn seed sowing and planting, including some new perennial

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

vegetables I’m introducing to my allotment.