Nasturtium Alaska Apricot

Half the appeal of 'Alaska Apricot' is the foliage. The leaves are marbled and splashed in cream over green, so the plant is worth looking at long before it flowers, and it carries soft apricot blooms held clear above the leaves rather than buried in them.

Everything on a nasturtium is edible and peppery — leaves, flowers and the green seed pods, which can be pickled as a passable substitute for capers.

Grow it hard. This is the one plant where poor, dry, unimproved soil genuinely produces a better result. Feed it or plant it in rich ground and you will get a magnificent mound of leaves and almost no flowers at all. It is also worth planting near beans as a decoy, since blackfly will choose it over the crop.