Planting a cutting garden

Having a garden full of flowers is a joy.  After the cold deary days of winter those first pops of colour with early jonquils and daffodils in spring are like a breath of fresh air, followed by the explosion of blooms and waves of fragrance that follows in the summer, when the true bounty of a flower garden begins.  As gardeners it is very easy to be hesitant to pick any of these precious blooms, typically we're fearful of spoiling the look of our gardens, and if it's something we've grown lovingly from seed, or spent a fortune on at the nursery, the idea of taking a pair of snips to a plant can bring us out in a cold sweat.
But it shouldn't be like this because flowers truly are a gift from nature and there is nothing quite like bringing them indoors to enjoy.  Gifting flowers to a friend or family member is actually quite thrilling...knowing that you grew it yourself adds to the moment....but even cutting flowers for yourself, it brightens your home, lifts your mood and will give you days of pleasure.  Once they fade you have the luxury of going out to your garden and cutting some more.
Perhaps a good way to work around these fears of cutting from your garden is to specifically grow a cutting garden.  Put aside a patch that gets full sun, even if it's only a small bed, (for example a 1 metre by 3 metre space) and grow yourself some spring and summer annuals.  This way you can cut as much as you like, as often as you like, and you are not spoiling the look of your ornamental garden at all.
So the question now is...what do I grow?  Hopping online and scrolling a seed website might confuse you all the more because there are so many different and beautiful things to grow and the variety of flowers available seem almost endless.  The more you research you will also find that your confusion levels begin to escalate because not all flowers are equal.  Some are great cut flowers, some not so much.  Some have tall stems perfect for a vase or bouquet, others only grow short stems, more suited to a border or bedding.  Some last well as a cut flower, others wilt the second you take a pair of snips to them.  There are those that produce only a single stem and others that will bloom copiously over the entire season, giving you more flowers than you know what to do with.  So which is it?  And where do you start?
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Grow ingredients 

A little bit like baking a cake...but the way to simplify it is to grow the ingredients you need to create a bouquet or vase arrangement.  A well structured arrangement will have five things; a focal flower, a secondary flower, filler, foliage and an accent flower, which is either a spike flower, something wispy or textural.  Knowing these five ingredients gives you the backbone to help decide what to grow for each of the seasons; so what flowers will fill these roles in spring, summer and autumn?
If you are a newbie grower probably the kindest thing you can do for yourself is grow flowers that are a bit user friendly.  Choose something that has seeds that are easier to germinate, flowers that prefer growing in your climate and preferably those that will flower profusely over the course of the season.  It's a real confidence boost for a new grower if you have armloads of blooms to harvest, compared to trying to start the tiniest of seeds (for example Iceland poppies), and certainly slaving away over seeds and seedlings and to then have it produce a single flower (like a stock), can certainly put a dampener on things.  There are quite a few seeds, as well as bulbs and tubers, that are easy to start, will produce a glut of flowers and have you filling your house all season.

Best cut flower varieties to grow

To save you the leg work here are my favourite cut flower varieties to grow by season.  Note; do make sure you research when to sow or plant these varieties in your specific climate and whether you direct sow or start in trays.  Depending on your climate you may be able to start your spring flowers in the autumn before, which gives you a jump on the season.  Do some extra research, but if a plant is a hardy annual it means it can generally over winter and can be started in the autumn.

Spring

Focal flowers
Daffodils and tulips are planted as bulbs, which are about as easy as it can get.  Although they will only give you the one flower they are great easy care for the beginner cut flower grower.  Order at the end of summer and when they arrive in autumn plant them in the ground.  Directions for how deep etc. are always included.  Tulips are especially showy and come in so many different colours and amazing forms.  For the longest stems for arranging pull out the whole bulb instead of cutting (it's what flower farmers do), although you will only have the flower for one year.  You can of course cut low at the base of the flower and they will come back next year, you'll just have shorter stems.  Daffodils are great because they will naturalise, meaning they will multiply over the years and you will gradually have more and more flowers to harvest.  Daffodils also come in a huge range of colours, from soft lemons to white to pink and the usual bright yellow.  They can be ruffled or trumpet shaped or gorgeous double blooms.  Don't just think bright yellow bog standard daffs, they are so much more than that.  With both tulips and daffodils make sure you allow the foliage to die back after their season has finished so they can absorb the sugars back into the bulb so they will bloom again next year.

Secondary flowers
The secondary flower will offset your focal bloom.  The colour can be completely different to the focal flower, being one that is complimentary on the colour wheel, or it could be the same colour but just in a different shade, either darker or lighter.  Often a secondary flower is a daisy shape, like a ranunculus, or could even be a group of three small flowers bunched together, like three cornflowers.  Ranunculus are another easy flower, as they are grown from a corm (similar to a bulb) and are started in autumn.  They belong to the buttercup family, and although their soft billowy petals seem fragile, these flowers can last up to ten days in a vase.  They come in a gorgeous array of colours, from pastels through to striking deep reds and bright orange.  For the largest blooms and the best cut flowers order the Italian ranunculus corms.  They are slightly more expensive but definitely worth it.  They will give you more than one flower and after they finish blooming you can dig up the corms and store for the following year.  You will also find that they will multiply.  You can leave them in the ground if you prefer, and they will come back the next year, but in the meantime you can plant a summer crop over the top.  Cornflowers are a good one too, although these you start from seed.  They prefer to be direct sown as they don't like their roots to be disturbed, but this limits the amount of work for you, less fussing around with seed trays and planting out.  They come in a nice mix of colours, from pinks and mauves, and a very classy dark magenta called Black Ball.  The typical bright 'Cornflower blue' is great too, although it is a hard colour to work with amongst other spring flowers.  

Filler
By filler a florist or flower farmer will mean the fluff that fills up the bouquet.  Often it is a flower that has a large head made up of lots of smaller flowers; for example like Queen Anne's Lace.  A good one is Chocolate Lace, which looks the same, but comes in an interesting mix of cream, brown and a dark rose pink.  It blends really well with a lot of different colours and if you start it in the autumn you may find that you have it blooming by late spring.  Another great filler I find is Sweet William.  This flower is actually a biennial, meaning it will produce foliage the first year and flower in the second.  However you can trick a biennial into giving you blooms the year after you start it.  Sow your biennial seeds at the start of summer, then plant out your seedlings at the end of summer before it starts getting cold, and by the following spring you will have flowers.  Sweet William is a great one because it fills that 'hungry gap' (that time between the spring flowers finishing and the dreaded wait for the summer ones to start) and you can even use it before the flower petals open up; the fuzzy green heads make a really interesting fill in a bouquet, particularly with the fresh pop of bright green that is so lovely in spring bouquets.

Foliage
If you are lucky enough to have a good garden then you can simply ransack your shrubs and trees!  Whatever you have growing, give it a go.  See how it behaves when cut.  Eucalyptus is a standard foliage in bouquets, and generally one that everyone thinks of, but step outside the box with your foliage and give everything a go.  The trick here is just making sure you condition everything properly, which means that once you cut it make sure you let it have a really good drink in a bucket of clean water.  For a woody stem it can help if you snip up the length of the stem by about an inch (3 centimetres) and give it a twist upwards.  Some foliage (or even flowers for that matter) may go floppy after cutting.  These are what is know as a 'wimpy drinker'.  To help remedy this stand the ends of the stem in boiling water for about ten seconds, then plunge back into cold water.  This is known as searing and usually will bring a sad flower or piece of foliage back to life.  Great foliage examples that I use include pelargonium, camellia leaves, mint (and other herbs), branches of blossom trees and pittosporum.  In spring bouquets the fresh bright green foliage is particularly nice.

Accent flower
I grow snapdragons, which are a fantastic flower, a beautiful spike shape that has florets all up the stem, shaped somewhat like dragon faces.  They come in the most gorgeous colours and some are extra ruffly.  Snapdragons aren't for the faint hearted though as the seed is tiny and takes quite a while to germinate, but if you are keen, and patient, I highly recommend them.  Just make sure that you start them in trays and bottom water them, which means have your cell tray sitting in a solid bottom tray that you put the water into, instead of watering in the usual overhead method.  Spray them with a hose and you risk blasting your seeds all over the place.  They can be hard to sow because they are so tiny but if you get clumps of little seedlings don't panic, once they are a few inches high you can carefully transplant them and spread them out into other pots.  I find that they don't mind being moved.  Snapdragons will also give you more than one flower, particularly if you pinch them, which means snipping off the centre growing shoot, down to a set of leaves, when they are about 20 centimetres tall.  By doing this they will branch out from the pinch and you will get more flowers.  Another lovely accent flower are sweet peas.  For not only the gorgeous colours and curly green foliage that will create lovely cascading shapes in your arrangement, they have the most amazing scent.  Sweet pea seeds are a larger round seed which is really easy to start.  It helps to soak them overnight, and I start mine in seed trays because I don't trust the mice not to eat them.  They love them.  You will need netting or a trellis to grow them on, but they will reward you with an abundance of flowers.  You will need to keep on top of picking them otherwise they will very quickly go to seed.  You can pick just the flowers on their long straight stems, or you can cut more deeply into the plant and use the foliage as well, which creates a lot of interesting angles, plus the curly tendrils look amazing.

Summer

Focal flower
Hands down the best and easiest focal flower is the dahlia.  I am, of course, biased when it comes to dahlias as these are by far my favourite and were the flowers that got me into this whole shenanigans in the first place.  The varieties are almost endless, the colours sublime and they produce more flowers than you will know what to do with.  These plants do need to come with a warning, however, because once you start growing them you will suddenly need to own them all and your addiction will start.  You have been warned!!  Dahlias grow easily from a tuber that you plant once it starts to warm up and all risk of frost has passed.  The plants generally grow tall, depending on the variety, and you will find yourself harvesting buckets of blooms over the entire summer and autumn.  They are the most giving plant.  You can also start them from seed, which is a whole other rabbit hole, but when starting from seed you don't know what the flowers will look like until they bloom.  Dahlias have quite complex genetics (a whole other blog post) and it's a huge game of chance as to what the bloom will look like.

Secondary flower 
Zinnias are a great one for the beginner grower.  They come in a fantastic range of colours as well as different varieties, from the larger Benary series, to the smaller and often double Oklahoma series, to the unusual colours of the Queen Lime series.  These three varieties are all good ones to grow as cut flowers because they have longer stems.  Zinnias are a tender annual, so they don't like being planted outside until the risk of frost is over, but they are easy to start from seed (they have nice larger seeds, so easy to handle) and can even be direct sowed.  

Filler
Good fillers for summer and autumn can include Feverfew, which is a perennial, but it's not difficult to start from seed.  It has a bit of a weird smell, but I actually don't mind it.  It's a cute little daisy type flower and there are a few different varieties.  It looks really sweet in a bouquet.  Yarrow is also a great filler, again another perennial, but it's a good one because it spreads easily so once you have it....you have it.  It comes in some lovely colours that look stunning in summer and particularly autumn bouquets.  

Foliage
Once again use what you can find when it comes to foliage.  I find that the sage green of eucalyptus ties in nicely with dahlias, especially the pinks and pastel colours.  I did an autumn wedding earlier this year; the bride choosing burgundy, oranges and soft yellows for her colour scheme, and I found that the sage green blended really well.  I also used dark foliage in burgundies and even in slightly brown tones.  Foliage is definitely underrated and I think it's something that, if you be creative, can make your bouquets stand out from what everyone else is doing.  Autumn is a perfect time to try something different too, the autumnal colours are spectacular.

Accent flowers
For a nice little wiggle in your arrangements you can't go past cosmos.  It's so easy to germinate and there are lots of different varieties in a whole range of colours.  It flowers and flowers and flowers too, just make sure you pinch the plant when it is smaller.  You may find the plant needs support too, so either corral or stake it.  To stop it going to seed you will need to keep on top of harvesting but if you cut deep, and into the foliage too (which is also lovely in arrangements), you should find that it sees you through the season.  Another good one is scabiosa as it dances above an arrangement well.  I also like celosia too, particularly the plumed varieties.  The seeds are smaller but worth it when you are feeling more confident.  

I hope this helps with your new cut flower garden!  Good luck!

Amber