This spring brings the fantastic and unexpected colors of the Land of Oz into your garden plot. Luminescent pink eggplant will dazzle your eyes and ruby red corn will make you smile.

Thanks to innovative seed companies, you can turn your garden into a Technicolor treat. You’ll find unusual heirloom vegetables as well as new vegetable varieties. Gardening Web sites and catalogues are offering seeds for vegetables that taste good and are festive looking as well.

In fact, the newest vegetables are so appealing you don’t have to be fond of green to grow greens.

How about purple greens? The bean, which turns green on cooking, is stringless and comes in pole or bush variety.

“It’s been around for a long, long time and is starting to have a resurgence in the garden,” says Lance Frazon, a gardening expert with Johnny Sheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds in Bantam, Conn.

Frazon is also fond of Purple Dragon carrots, one of the most popular varieties his company offers.

“It has a purple skin but is orange inside. It’s not overly sweet like some carrots but has a little spicy flavor,” says Franzon, whose company is one of the leading sellers of heirloom vegetable seeds.

Rainbow-colored Swiss chard has been available for several years, with more color variations each season. Look for the “Neon Lights” or “Bright Lights” on the label and expect to be treated to white, gold, magenta, pink, orange and mauve-stemmed chard.

Red celery, another heirloom crop, is startling in its vibrant color. The outer core is red with a flesh that ranges from red to pink to yellow. Not only is it beautiful, but it’s better tasting than the typical green celery, according to Franzon.

If you’ve grown ornamental peppers you know these aren’t the best-tasting varieties. But now that’s changing with the new ornamental called Tangerine Dream.

“It has golden to blush-orange fruit that looks like it’s exploding from the plant,” says Grace Romero, with The Cook’s Garden in Southhampton, Pa. “This is sweeter and tastier than most ornamental peppers.”

Cucumbers, a pretty staid crop, are available in some startling varieties as well. Romero recommends the Yellow Submarine, a two- to three-inch long fruit with a small seed cavity. Franzon is offering a lemon cucumber, shaped like its fruit namesake. The flavor is a little more sprightly than that of a regular cucumber.

Go to any fine restaurant and you’ll see how chefs are using heirloom vegetables to bring more taste and color to their dishes.

Ingredients such as purple Brussels sprouts are grown for chefs by companies like The Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio. But you can bet that if the vegetables become popular enough they’ll make their way into consumer seed catalogues.

However, you can duplicate a restaurant’s pricey and exotic tomato salad with your own harvest. Romaro suggests using unusual tomatoes such as Big Rainbow, a large yellow slicing tomato with scarlet streaks, or Black Krim, a purple-fleshed tomato.

Unfortunately, a vegetable doesn’t necessarily taste great just because it has a funky color. Franzon is still looking for purple broccoli that meets his flavor expectations. And although he likes the taste of purple cauliflower, he hasn’t found a seed source for them yet.

Growing colorful crops

Vegetables are usually consigned to a plot away from the house because they’re not as attractive as flower beds, but that may change with colorful crops.

“I’m blending ornamental vegetables and flowers in my kitchen garden. The vegetables are so pretty I can put them together with flowers in a garden bed,” says Romero.

Vegetable seeds are being developed with higher disease resistance so they’re less likely to infect susceptible flowers, Romero says.

Bev Bennett is an Evanston, Ill.-based freelance writer.