An edimental garden drops the usual line between "the vegetable patch" and "the flower bed" and plants both together, choosing edible plants partly for how they look rather than treating looks and food as separate jobs for separate parts of the garden. It's a genuine shift in how a lot of gardens are being designed right now, driven mostly by small-section and urban gardeners who want to grow real food without the garden looking like a dedicated allotment plot bolted onto the lawn.
Some of the best edimental choices are plants already well suited to double duty. Rainbow chard and silverbeet, with their red, gold and pink-ribbed stems, hold their own as a border plant next to anything grown purely for colour, while still being a genuinely productive cut-and-come-again green. Purple-leafed basil reads as an ornamental foliage plant sitting among flowers as easily as it does next to tomatoes. Nasturtium does three jobs at once: it's a sprawling, colourful groundcover, its flowers and leaves are both edible, and it's already documented on this site as a trap crop that draws aphids and caterpillars away from nearby vegetables, which makes it one of the few plants that's genuinely better for being mixed into an ornamental bed rather than kept separate. Calendula works the same way, with edible petals and a well-documented role luring aphids and cabbage white butterfly away from a vegetable crop nearby.
A few of the flowers already in this site's own plant data double as edimentals without needing to be reframed as anything new. Dianthus, the fragrant cottage-garden staple, has genuinely edible petals, a detail most gardeners growing it purely for its scent and colour never think to use. On a larger scale, feijoa and citrus both work as a flowering, fruiting hedge in place of a purely ornamental one, giving a garden's boundary the same screening job a hedge already does while adding a real harvest on top.
Dianthus, the fragrant cottage-garden staple, has genuinely edible petals, a detail most gardeners growing it purely for its scent and colour never think to use.
Layout matters more than plant choice alone. Taller edibles like sweetcorn or sunflowers (themselves edible via their seeds) work well at the back of a bed the way any tall ornamental would, with mid-height plants like chard, kale or dwarf beans filling the middle, and fast, low-growing salad greens or herbs edging the front where they're easy to reach and pick. Gaps between slower-growing perennials are also worth treating as planting space rather than bare mulch: a short row of lettuce or a clump of parsley tucked between established shrubs fills a spot that would otherwise just be sitting empty while those shrubs mature.
One real caution is worth knowing before mixing food and ornamentals freely. Not every plant sold as an ornamental at a garden centre has been grown with food use in mind, and some ornamental cultivars, including of plants that are technically edible species, are bred and treated with sprays intended for decorative use rather than eating. If a specific plant or variety is going into a bed partly because it's edible, it's worth sourcing it from a seed company or nursery that sells it as food, rather than assuming any plant from the same species sold as purely ornamental is automatically safe to eat.
For a small or urban New Zealand section without room for a separate dedicated vegetable plot, this is close to the most space-efficient way to garden: every bed does double duty, nothing has to be sacrificed to make room for the other, and the overall effect reads as one deliberately designed garden rather than a tidy ornamental half bolted onto a utilitarian vegetable half.