Fabulous flowers in every room add a decorating accent, as well as a feeling of warmth and hospitality, to your home.
While this might be the main goal of a cutting garden, there are other perks.
These gardens first delight with a spectacular outdoor bouquet before continuing their journey into your home.
To have a continuous flush of flowers for cutting, the gardener needs to carefully plan and select the plants.
A mixture of annuals, biennials, perennials and bulbs makes for a lush arrangement. Think about different shapes of flowers for vase variety, such as long and spiky veronica, round and lacy pincushion flowers and billowy cosmos.
Consider the colors that will complement your décor. For example, yellows and blues can be achieved with daffodils and grape hyacinths in the spring. A vase of all scarlet zinnias will provide vibrant reds to accent a room in the summer.
Another consideration is the many varieties of ornamental grasses. These add rich foliage to a vase.
For a succession of blooms, plant flowers that will produce from early spring to late fall.
Spring is actually a perfect time to plan for the bulbs you will plant in fall. The flower beds are not as full and lush as they will be in five months, so you can more easily determine now where you want more color next year.
Mark these areas with small, plastic stakes, which won’t be noticeable in a few weeks, but will serve as a guide of where to dig and plant in fall.
As the weather warms, spring flowering explodes with cutting options. Lilacs and dogwood bushes offer both beautiful and fragrant limbs for tall vases. Bearded irises are stunning in flower arrangements. Perennial pincushion flowers are a great standby for any cutting garden. They begin blooming early and continue all season.
Flowers that self-sow are excellent choices because they volunteer to return year after year. Included in this group are bachelor’s buttons, larkspur, poppies and violas (Johnny Jump-ups). They do not always come back where you want them, but they are reliable. These are all easy to start from seed in the spring and usually bloom the first year. They will bloom into the early summer and provide flowers until the heat-loving summer flowers take over.
Summer is a profusion of possibilities for cut flowers, including perennials, which reduce the cost of future cutting gardens. Shasta daisies, Jupiter’s beard, daylilies, yarrow and coreopsis are both heat-resistant and drought-hardy once established.
Annuals such as zinnias and cosmos will begin blooming midsummer and continue through fall, especially if cut often. Monarda (bee balm) is actually an herb, but a great flower for cutting. Sunflowers are an all-time favorite, especially among children, and for them the taller the better. Let the kids start these seeds and cut the flowers for their own arrangements.
By fall some flowers may be tired, but there are many stalwarts to keep the vases full. Coreopsis, purple coneflower, rudbeckia and asters can make colorful and long-lasting arrangements.
The location for a cutting garden is a matter of preference. One school of thought is to intersperse the cutting plants within the regular garden, but one drawback is that enough plants must be used so you don’t denude the landscape when cutting.
To avoid this, another option is to plant a separate cutting garden in an out-of-the-way spot so you won’t mind if it occasionally looks stripped. If you choose this alternative, be sure to separate the annuals from the perennials so soil can be amended and tilling done easily. And remember that many flowering plants require six hours of sun a day.
Above all, cut often. This replenishes the garden, since with most flowers, the more you cut, the more you get. And this is the goal of a cutting garden – to bring the beauty of the garden indoors.
Linda Kennedy is a Colorado State University Cooperative Extension master gardener in Broomfield County.
