Can you make jam from flowers?

Can you make jam from flowers? You can. Violets, rose petals, elderflowers. In 2019, when we began making jam for our first Jam and Jam project here at Lewisham Unity, we scoured the neighbourhood just around our own small urban block for fruit to preserve — and found that in June and July the neighbourhood was full of rose petals. One of the first jams we made was a pale, pretty, perfectly pink fragrant rose petal jam. Later we made jam from the rose hips. Flower jams come in translucent colours — violet jams especially, and pale cream-yellow elderflower jam. The clear lozenge yellow of dandelion jelly is one of the loveliest I have come across. I found the recipe first on the Bakers Brigade site and then found it everywhere, alongside, this year, the admonition not to mow dandelions but to leave them for bees. A year on from our first foraging for jam fruits in Lewisham the immediacy of ecological degradation feels even closer. The clear pearly pink rose petal jam we made is still in jars in the meeting house where we made it, waiting for labels, as we set off on a new jam and marmalade making season — new projects and new stories. After the rose petals we found blackberries — actually the then twenty-month old Astrid, daughter of artist and jam maker Clare Qualmann, found them since they were at her level — and so blackberry was our next jam, followed by apples, with most other fruits (damson, more berries), foraged japonica quinces, rowans, rose hips and pears — and green tomato chutney from the last garden tomatoes. What we found last year was that the fruit was right there, under our hands, so to speak. In local playgrounds and lining urban streets, in back lanes and on the edges of bits of scrub land. Behind fences and climbing walls, the neighbourhood was so much fuller of things to make preserves with than we would ever have thought. This year we start a new kind of jam and jam project altogether — making flower and petal jam in May and end-of-summer jam (apples, blackberries, quinces, pears) in September. So, yes you can make jam from flowers, and we’ll report on what they taste like and how to make them. In the mean time I am enjoying reading about Lillie Brown’s London Borough of Jam — Lillie does jam making workshops and makes small batches, among them flower jams, and also unusually evocative combinations and tastes — loquat and sweet cicely is one.  Do loquats grow in Lewisham? We’ll find out …