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Posted on: April 6, 2011

Have your flowers and pick them, too!

Enjoy your garden by planting for cuttings that leave outside blooms beautiful while enjoying the bounty inside, too

By Dawn Klingensmith
CTW Features

To cut or not to cut? That is the question: Is it nobler to leave flowers intact in the outdoors, or to take clippers against a sea of blooms, and by bringing them indoors, hasten their demise?

Besides shortening the lifespan of plantings you’ve lovingly tended, cutting flowers for indoor arrangements diminishes the floral show in your yard.

But it’s possible to have the best of both worlds by setting aside space specifically for a cutting garden. Tuck it away where it’s not on display, or combine it with a vegetable garden. Keep in mind it’s a production garden, so the layout should be utilitarian, not ornamental, with widely spaced rows for easy access. Choose a site that receives generous sun and drains well.

Create space nearby for a compost pile.

“In a cutting garden, once something stops blooming, you pull it out and replace it with something else. So you produce a lot of green waste,” which can be turned to compost for next season’s garden, says Nicholas Staddon, director of new plants at Monrovia garden plant producers, headquartered in Azusa, Calif.

Plant to thrive

Choose your plants wisely: “Not all flowers that look beautiful in the ground will thrive in a vase. Poppies are a perfect example — as soon as you cut them, they flop over and die,” says Johanna Silver, test garden coordinator for Sunset magazine.

Classic cutting garden plants include cosmos, daffodils, daisies, dahlias, geraniums, larkspur, peonies, phlox, sweet peas, sunflowers, tulips and zinnias. Include foliage plants such as Artemisia and lamb’s ears, as well, to add texture, color and contrast to fresh and dried flower arrangements, Silver recommends.

Group plants by species and care requirements. For maximum production, plant annuals in succession, with early season, midseason and late-season bloomers grouped together.

“A good cutting garden offers something in bloom all season long,” says Amy Stewart, an avid gardener and author of two books about the global cut flower industry. “You might start with sweet peas in early spring, and move all the way through to dahlias that bloom in early fall.”

Cut and deadhead blossoms regularly to spur and maintain flower production; otherwise, they will go to seed and stop blooming.

To cultivate flowers that will stand proud and tall in a vase, encourage them to grow straight to begin with by placing stakes around the perimeter of the cutting garden and creating a grid of strings that run between the stakes, supporting the flowers in an upright position, Stewart suggests.

Harvest flowers in the morning, when they are freshest, and place them in lukewarm water as soon as possible. Use floral sheers instead of scissors so as not to crush the stem and cut off the blossom’s water supply.

Arranging: 101

Leave just a few leaves for color contrast and visual interest, and remove the rest so they won’t deprive the flower head of nutrients. Make sure none of the remaining leaves come in contact with the water.

For foolproof floral designs, “You can’t go wrong with monochromatic arrangements,” says Grayson Handy, author of “Flowers for the Home: Inspirations from the World Over” (Rizzoli, 2009). Complementary colors work well, too, he says, “but using too many colors can look very naive, like a child who got his first box of crayons and is trying to use every color.”

Instead of vases, use vessels you find around your home and garden, such as watering cans, jelly jars and water pitchers.