10 Fresh and Tender Spring Greens for Salads

Arugula is a dark green, peppery green that is used both raw and cooked. Wild arugula tends to have more of a kick than the cultivated kind. If the level of peppery kick is important to you, be sure to taste a bit before you buy, if possible, since its flavor ranges from quite mild to rather spicy.

Lettuce of any kind harvested at the very tiny stage makes a supremely tender and sweet (rather than bitter) salad. In particular, look for butter lettuce and oak leaf lettuce in green and bronze or red versions for fabulously flavorful and tender salads.

Butter–or Boston–lettuce is a delicate, head lettuce with very loose, cup-like leaves. Toss the leaves with a simple Lemon Vinaigrette or use them in this Butter Lettuce Asparagus Salad or as the vehicles in this Chicken Lettuce Cups.

Chard comes in Swiss (white ribs), red, golden, and mixed rainbow versions. Each has its own flavor, but an earthy edge defines them all. Chard is usually cooked, but can be chopped up and added to salads raw. In any case, many dishes benefit from cutting the ribs out from the leaves and cooking them separately.

Dandelion greens are dark green and famously bitter. Long, slow cooking mellows their bitterness, if that's what you want, but some of us love that cleansing taste of fresh and sharp dandelion greens in recipes.

Escarole isn't only grown in the spring, but spring escarole is sweeter and more tender than at other times of the year. Escarole is delicious simply cooked as well as paired with small spring beets. Look for smooth-leaf and frizzy varieties.

Pea greens are the vines on which peas would eventually grow. They tend to be available—in giant tangled masses—at farmers markets in spring and early summer when farmers thin their fields.

Spinach is so widely available all year-round, it's easy to forget that the small, tender leaves of spring spinach are a real treat. There is a sweetness to their dark green leaves that is perfect in spinach salads, such as Wilted Spinach Salad.

Bags of "spring mix salad greens" are often available year-round. Ideally, these mixes are a combination of different baby lettuces along with a bit of arugula, spinach, and/or baby chard.

Watercress has a bright, peppery flavor prized for salads. It grows wild in streams in Northern America and Europe but is easily cultivated with the right irrigation. Much cultivated "watercress" is actually garden cress, which has less bite and crunch than true watercress. Whatever cress we're talking about, they're all members of the mustard family. The older they get—either in the ground or after being harvested—the sharper their flavor becomes. Use cress as soon as possible after it's been picked, discarding any yellowed or wilted leaves when you clean it. Note that the tender stalks and roots are perfectly edible along with the dark green leaves.