Nine-star broccoli is a rare, long-lived perennial brassica that, instead of dying after one crop, comes back year after year to throw up a cluster of small creamy-white heads — usually around nine — on a single leafy plant. A heritage cut-and-come-again cauliflower-broccoli that behaves like a productive shrub, it is picked head by head over spring and, if cropped diligently before it flowers, can keep going for five or six years — a curiosity of the old cottage garden that offers early greens with almost no replanting.