Native Plant Gardens Hold Distinctive Holiday Flavors and Fragrances
November 2025. By Oscar Ortega: When Angelenos break free from mundane lawns, rows of annuals, and ficus hedges, we discover new worlds! New birdsong. New beauty. New fragrance. New flavors! Native plant gardens offer the chance for you to forage distinctive ingredients for holiday meals. Here are a few of our favorite flavors.
Native Sages: Season-Appropriate Savory
It’s natural to focus on the magical blooms of Sacred Sage and her sisters. Their foliage is just as fragrant – and distinctively flavorful. Leaves can be made into or added to tea, fried and served crispy, or folded into other recipes that call for more conventional sages. Each has a slightly different flavor profile – some have light medicinal impacts.
Native Herbs: Deliciously Different
Where native sages riff on expected sage flavors, both Yarrow and California Sagebrush offer true diversion from the norm. Here, we recommend taking them to the test kitchen to get comfortable with their impact. Taste dried and crushed sagebrush‘s impact on roasted carrots, in mashed potatoes, on chicken. Try yarrow as a pesto for pasta, a dried herb on veggies, in salads, or as an infusion for salad dressing. Both have medicinal properties – that is worth checking into if you are serving pregnant people or anyone with known medical conditions.
Strawberry Tree Fruit: Not Candy!
While a hybrid, it’s hard not to mention the fruits of Strawberry Trees. With an appearance of mini candied apples or cherries, they appear quite enticing, like a perfect holiday treat, don’t they? It’s easy to imagine they will be sweet and crunchy – they are not. In jams and jellies, they can delight.
Manzanita Blooms: Sweet and Crunchy
Looking for a sweet crunch for an autumn salad? A lovely, unexpected garnish? Look to manzanitas in your garden – their delectable little blooms deliver both. Depending on your mix of habitat plants, you may see stiff competition with hungry hummingbirds who rely on a limited palette this time of year.
Coyote Mint: Refreshing!
For an unexpected after-dinner treat, look to your Coyote Mint. While its blooms have long faded, its evergreen foliage holds its minty fragrance and forage-ready flavor. It makes a refreshing, cold mint tea.
Harvestable Hedges: The Ultimate Resource
Christmas Berry brings decor, birdsong and flavor through the holidays. Depending on your location, you may already have red-and-ripe berries, ready to be made into a uniquely LA cranberry jams or sauce. If yours are still in green, yellow or pink berry territory, watch and wait. You may still get some free background music from the birds who will also be watching and waiting for a ripe moment.
While other harvestable alternatives to ubiquitous ficus, like Lemonade Berry and Catalina Cherry, are usually past their prime by November, whiplash weather is inspiring some plants to bloom and berry at unusual times. These are such fun treats, it may be worth searching your shrubs for them.
More Information
We’ve recently updated our Pinterest Boards with Native Plant Recipes and a full year of native plant flavors.
Here are more sources and further resources:
- Harmonize Meals
- Harvest Your Hedge
- Golden Gate Park Conservancy: Tasty Tea Recipes
- Forager Chef: Cooking with Yarrow
- Self-Heal School: Sacred Native Plants
- American College of Health Care Sciences: Yarrow, Herb of the Year
