Pentas
Pentas Lanceolata

days to maturity: 90 - 100 days
plant spacing: 2 plants per square foot
sunlight requirement: 6 - 14 hours
look out for: spider mites and aphids
harvest notes: harvest often and deadhead
annual

Pentas is a very Florida friendly perennial flowering shrub that you may already be very familiar with . Pentas develop sparkling star- shaped flowers all summer and winter long in bold hues of red, white, lavender, purple, or pink. Pentas is a sun lover that grows 18 to 36 inches tall and when you harvest the flower clusters often it will flower prolifically. In most parts of the country, pentas is considered an annual, but in very warm regions like ours, pentas is perennial . We first started to see this flower referred too as “edible” by the most famous garnish and specialty crop farm in North America called “Chefs Garden”, in Ohio. They call it “Egyptian star flower” maybe to fancy it up before selling it to the fanciest chefs in America.... and we were excited to learn that our plain old beautiful common pentas flower were technically edible. Besides being edible this plant is also very pollinator friendly and a great companion plant for the garden.

These plants were not grown organically by us, we purchased them from a conventional nursery.