We Love: the Cutting Garden
Posted:6 July 2014
This fabulous picture of our friend Deborah carrying an armful of sweet peas freshly cut from The Garden House inspired me to write about cutting gardens.
At The Garden House we love to bring scent and colour into the house all year long by planning ahead and growing flowers and foliage especially for cutting bulbs, annuals, biennials, perennials, shrubs trees and climbers.
Summer annuals grown from seed offer the fastest, most colourful and varied blooms – Antirrhinums (snapdragons), Cosmos, Salvias, Gaillardia, Nigellas, Malope trifida, Cornflowers, Sweet peas, Larkspur, Ammi majus, Cerinthe, Scabious Salvia viridis (annual clary sage), Heleniums – the list is almost endless. What’s more, annuals are generally cut-and-come-again the more you cut them the more flowers they create as the plants are not putting their energy into creating seed heads.
Add unexpected additions from your border perennials, tendrils of climbers, alliums, lilies, roses and seedheads. We also grow many different dahlias at The Garden House which make wonderful cut flowers and can be used in many different flower combinations adding drama, scale and colour.
Foliage too is important cut delicate twiggy branches from shrubs such as pittisporum and young eucalyptus, or use bronze fennel or the limey-green Euphorbia oblongata.
There are all sorts of clever ways to keep flowers that have been cut lasting longer in the vase – searing with boiling water, crushing etc but frankly who has the time. Treat your cut flowers as a transitory pleasure, if they survive only a few days, so be it, enjoy them while they last and then cut a new bunch!
Think of the cutting garden as a functional space, You’ll need to find a part of the garden that’s sunny, maybe slightly tucked away; make sure the beds are not too big, so that you can step into the bed or stretch across to cut, and don’t forget to consider a good water source (preferably collected rainwater) for periods of drought. The RHS website offers some useful advice.
Plan ahead for next year by ordering your seeds – we sell many different types at The Garden House shop just email us and we can post to you.
If buying seeds online Derry Watkins’ Special Plants Nursery is a great source of slightly unusual seeds, also Sarah Ravens website is a good source (her book The Cutting Garden is both inspiring and practical).
If you simply don’t have the space but love the idea of having bunches of fresh garden flowers in your house (rather than those flowers flown in from Europe and beyond), or for a special occasion such as a wedding, then consider buying from local cut flower sellers. Among others, consider Sussex Cutting Garden, Sweet Peas Direct, or The Real Flower Company.
