I've spent many summers growing my own vegetables for dinner, and the most beautiful ones were for salads - the wonderful greens, like buttercrunch, Romaine, radicchio, and the like. I'd have to stagger my planting times, so all of them would not maximize growth all at once.
I always had cilantro, parsley, thyme, oregano, and onion sets. These herbs added scent as well as color.
Long ago, I made a salad I called "Mossy Forest Salad", that just had about everything in it that you'd tramp underfoot - especially mung bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, and sunflower seeds. A Persian salad would have tomatoes, cucumber and onion with a dressing of olive oil, lemon, garlic, and ground black pepper. Turkish salads were similar, but with mint, feta cheese, and lemon juice added. I grew my own fava beans, too, and added them too.
So many vegetables can be enjoyed in a salad, and also, in a clear vase, with the tangle of roots showing in the water. Every spring, one of my first bouquets brought into the house would be a tangle of clean radishes, soaking in a round glass vase. If you've grown radishes, you know you'll grow far too many to eat, unless you are growing them for the spray of white flowers they have in late summer. Those go good with dahlias in bloom. And, the seed pods, when bleached grey by the sun, make nice accents in a fall bouquet.
