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Time for a reality check

Once you’ve worked out the exciting part of what you want to grow – the types of flowers, foliage, and fillers and the color palette you want to work to – it’s time for a bit of a reality check before you can make your dreams come to life. Let’s think about the boring stuff for a second: time, money, and space. How much of each do you have to play with?

You’ll need to decide how and where you intend to grow your plants. Are you planning a dedicated cutting patch to pick from? Are you aiming to add just a few rows of blooms to your vegetable garden? Or are your existing garden borders the only space you have to play with? It’s possible to grow enough blooms for your house in each scenario.

Icelandic poppies growing alongside chard in the raised beds in my vegetable patch.

GROWING WITHIN YOUR EXISTING BEDS & BORDERS

If you already have an established garden, it’s probably brimming with suitable cut-flower material already – if you can bear to cut it. You just need to change how you view your garden – cutting from it may take a bit of getting used to. If you want just a few posies for the house each week, it’s perfectly feasible to have a stunning display in the garden as well as giving you plenty of material for the house by adding a few more cut flower-friendly shrubs and perennials and filling in any gaps with annuals.

GROWING ALONGSIDE YOUR VEGGIES

Flowers and vegetables make perfect bedfellows. The blooms encourage pollinators in the garden, which, in turn, ensure more vegetables and fruit for your table. When you’re growing flowers alongside your veggies, you really do begin to see them as a crop and they never feel too precious to cut. Treat them as you would your veggies and grow them in rows or blocks. There’s no need to worry too much about crop rotation – just try not to grow the same flowers in the same place each year. In my vegetable garden, I plant bulbs or tubers that will stay in the ground year after year (such as narcissi, grape hyacinths, and fritillaries) at the edges or end of the beds so that they won’t be disturbed if I need to plant over them or to dig.

WHAT KIND OF SOIL DO YOU HAVE?

Soil is divided into five types: clay, sandy, loam, chalky, and silty. This describes their composition and gives you an indication of how free-draining or moisture-retentive it is. It’s worth knowing what your soil type is as it effects how a plant will thrive and how much drainage and organic matter you’ll need to add to improve your soil. To test your soil, take a look at it and feel it – search online for “soil type” and you’ll see plenty of info on what to look for.

WHAT IS THE SOIL’S PH?

Soil pH is a number that describes how acidic or alkaline your soil is. You need to know whether your soil is acidic (that is, below pH7) or alkaline (that is, above pH7) because some plants, such as lilies and hydrangeas, require different pH levels. Soil testing is quick and easy to do – you can pick up a kit from your local garden center, and you’ll get your result within minutes. Knowing the pH of your soil will save a lot of heartache, trust me.

A raised bed dedicated to cut flowers; dusty miller, pincushion flower, and love-in-a-mist are planted in rows to form blocks. Sunflowers grow alongside tomatoes and honeywort in the bed behind.

GROWING IN A DEDICATED FLOWER PATCH

It will be much more productive if you can grow your flowers and foliage in rows and blocks, because they are so much easier for planning, planting, weeding, and picking.

It makes things easier to separate plants into type so that you have a permanent planting area for shrubs, perennials, and bulbs that are left in the ground and then another area for annuals – remember you are creating a productive garden not designing a garden in the normal sense. In my garden, I have a dedicated border for perennials and shrubs – it’s filled with roses, peonies, phlox, pincushion flowers, a few climbing roses, and a clematis against a willow fence.

I also have a dedicated “spring” border, which is planted with spring bulbs that stay in the ground from year to year: narcissi, grape hyacinths, and fritillaries. I’ve left areas of the bed bulb-free so that I can mingle in plantings of biennials and autumn-sown hardy annuals. I’ll plant over the top of the bulbs with half-hardy annuals once the bulb foliage dies back. It’s a truly hardworking patch and I’m cutting from it from mid-spring to autumn.

All the annuals are planted out in a series of raised beds within the vegetable garden, either mingled in among the vegetables or by themselves – I love being able to change what I’m growing each year.

A permanent planting of roses (alongside narcissi bulbs, which are out of season in this photograph) and buxus hedging flank each side of the path to the greenhouse.

POSITIONING YOUR PATCH

Most flowers like to bask in the sun, so choose the sunniest spot you have. If you have only a shady space available, your choice will be limited, but it’s still possible to grow plants for cutting (see Shade-Tolerant Plants, page 174).

Choose a sheltered spot – wind is not your friend as it will pummel taller stems and even the most stringent staking may fail. You can add windbreaks by putting in a willow fence or planting a hedge.

Don’t feel you have to relegate your patch to somewhere out of sight. Despite constant picking, my cutting garden is still one of the prettiest parts of my garden. Just be aware that if it’s looking stunning, you may be more reluctant to harvest.

I find raised beds are an easy way of growing flowers – a bed 4 ft (1 ⅕ m) wide is a comfortable size to ensure that you aren’t stepping on the soil while tending or picking. You’ll need a path in between beds of around 20–24 in (50–60cm) to allow access.

SHADE-TOLERANT PLANTS

While it’s true that most flowers we tend to grow for cutting like to bask in full sun, there are some that tolerate a bit of shade.

Foliage and fillers: mint, lady’s mantle), masterwort, honesty.

Hero flowers: hellebores, hydrangeas, snowball bush.

For secondary flowers: Solomon’s seal, bleeding heart, Japanese anemones.

Bulbs: snowdrops lily of the valley.

TIME ON THE PLOT/PATCH

You could make growing your own flowers a full-time pursuit – it will swallow as much time as you have to give it. However, you need to be realistic about the time you can commit. Start small, if necessary, and reign in your dreams just a little, for a season or two, until you’ve found your feet. I only manage to keep vaguely on top of my garden alongside everything else in my life by splitting the time I do have into small chunks. I’m still amazed by what can be achieved in a series of 10- or 15-minute slots.

TIME-SAVING TIPS

Do your weeding little and often so you catch weeds early. Use a hoe to decapitate weed seedlings, and they’ll shrivel to nothing within hours on a hot day. Growing in rows makes weeding so much quicker. I personally don’t use weed-barrier plastic, but professional growers do as it keeps weeds down to a minimum.

Don’t underestimate how long it takes to harvest your flowers. Planting in rows will help cut down the time it occupies. I find that color coordinating the beds also helps, as bouquets come together much more quickly.

Go for some of the “plant-and-forget-about-them” plants; flowering shrubs such as lilac or viburnum won’t create much work, but after a couple of years in the ground will give you masses of flowers to cut. A late-flowering clematis, such as C. ‘princess Kate’ in pruning group 3, just needs cutting down to the ground each spring and in return you’ll be able to pick flowering trails for months.

Installing a drip-irrigation system will save you hours of watering a week in a hot summer (it’s also a very efficient way of watering, as there’s very little lost to evaporation).

Buy your plants as potted plants instead of growing them from seed yourself. Or simply sow seed directly in the garden in spring; although you’ll have a shorter growing season, possibly with more casualties to slugs and snails, you won’t have to bother with potting and transplanting into the garden.

Start small – a wigwam of sweet peas, a row of narcissi followed by dahlias, and a row of hardy annuals such as love-in-a-mist, honeywort, and bishop’s flower for filler and foliage will give you something to pick in spring, summer, and right up to the first frosts Then add more plants as and when time allows.

A section of one of the beds in the cutting garden in late summer – nasturtiums alongside mixed grasses.

MONEY

It’s perfectly possible to grow a flower patch from a few packets of seed with very little expense, but costs soon start to mount up if you want to cultivate lots of varieties and add perennials and shrubs. To help keep costs down, grow as much as you can from seed, take cuttings, and divide your plants to build up stock. Source any bought material for your cutting garden as bare-root plants as it’s more cost-effective than “garden-ready” potted plants. I also swap seeds and seedlings with friends as I rarely ever use a whole packet of seed.

Roses, lupins, and peonies in the perennial bed.