Image credit: Create Academy
For an easy dose of nature, there is little to beat a bunch of fresh cut flowers to bring the outdoors in, whatever the weather. We’ve become a nation of flower fanciers, spending over £2bn a year on florist and supermarket bouquets – more than newspapers, crisps or concert tickets.
But behind this beauty is a darker underside, at odds with the natural world we seek to celebrate, due to the high carbon footprint of most cut flowers sold in the UK – 90% of which are imported.
If, like many shoppers, your weekly basket includes a standard bunch of supermarket flowers, with lilies and roses, you’re generating the same carbon footprint over a year as taking a monthly flight to Paris!
Flowers jetted in from as far afield as Ecuador, Colombia and Kenya come with the heavy baggage of not only air miles but also gallons of chemicals used in cultivation. The alternative is to buy British, as locally-grown flowers have just 10% of the carbon footprint of their imported equivalent. Most come from the hyper-local network of flower farmers across the UK, who are a small but growing segment of the overall market – up in value by nearly 50% in five years.
Rachel Siegfried, of Green & Gorgeous, typifies the British flower farmer, working down a quiet country lane to create ‘fresh from the garden’ flowers for weddings, to sell from the farm gate and at local markets. Working with the seasons, healthy soil and a dirt-under-the-fingernails intuition for plants, it’s a style of growing, Rachel says, that is all about good gardening not Big Agriculture.
A pioneer among flower farmers, she has condensed this knowledge and passion into a definitive book for gardeners called The Cut Flower Sourcebook (Filbert Press) that puts into your hands the skills to grow your own flowers easily, cheaply and sustainably.
“When I started out in the 2000s, everyone was into slow food and farmers’ markets, but there were no cut flowers at the markets back then,” she explains. “I wanted to share how beautiful these naturally grown arrangements are, evoking nature without the startlingly high environmental cost of imported flowers.”
Anyone with a garden can grow cut flowers, believes Rachel, as the potential lies in the shrub and perennial backbone of most of our gardens. This not only produces reliable material for cutting in every season, it’s a low-maintenance approach.
“You don’t need a huge number of stems when cutting for your home, so don’t worry about denuding your garden. Shrubs and perennial plants provide several seasons of interest,” she says. “A perennial like thalictrum has wonderful foliage to cut in spring, the flower in summer and a seedhead later in the year – so three cuts from one plant.”
Creating a summer border of rudbeckias, echinaceas, achilleas and gaura gives you months of colour for your vase, while grasses, lady’s mantle and umbels of cow parsley deliver the supporting froth. Shrubs steal the show with just a few stems of fresh-picked roses, hydrangeas or lilac.
For smaller spaces, climbers – including honeysuckle, jasmine, everlasting sweet peas or scrambling herbaceous clematis, such as ‘Arabella’ – make perfect cut flower plants by using vertical space, up arches and obelisks. And don’t overlook the potential of boundaries, by planting a ‘cutting hedge’ of wildlife-friendly hawthorn, viburnum, beech, large-leaved ivy, spindle, hazel and berries.
“Our flowering season can be quite short, so I’m a fan of using what there is, including dried plants, grasses, catkins, fruit, to reflect nature in that moment.”
Choosing slower-grown material often gives more character, so you need fewer stems to deliver interest in a vase or pot. “A lot of florists, when starting out, overstuff their arrangements,” she says.
“I like to be more informal, to find air between the flowers – as [florist] Constance Spry called it, ‘room for the butterflies’.”
But if it’s armfuls of flowers you’re after, then growing your favourite colourful blooms from a few packets of seed is a cheap, easy and sustainable way to raise a lot of plants. Author and plantswoman Clare Foster was mesmerised early in her gardening life by its ease and productivity.
“I’ve always been drawn to growing flowers,” she explains, “to cut them and bring them inside, and carry on looking at them close up. I also like taking them to friends or family in a jam jar – everyone appreciates this.”
Clare is aiming to demystify the process through a new online video course, How to Grow Flowers from Seed, that guides you through a year of sowing, picking and arranging.
“The best cut flowers, for me, are from plants that are easy to grow, don’t need huge maintenance, and flower prolifically."
“I go for those offering lots of smaller flowers, such as scabious, campanulas and phlox, rather than showstoppers like peonies that I’m reluctant to pick from the border.”
She advocates using a dedicated bed, in rows just 30cm apart, so the flowers feel like a crop and you’re not put off cutting them, as you might be from borders. Her raised bed is just 2.5m square, which she plots on paper early in the year, for interest every month.
“Plan a succession of flowers through the year to really milk that small space,” she explains. “You might start with tulips, digging them up once over to be replaced by dahlias. Among these you have ammi, larkspur, annual grasses and marigolds, then half-hardy annuals like cosmos and zinnias. So you’re using the bed from spring till autumn.”
She extends her picking options across the garden with pots of gladioli and long sheep troughs for swathes of cornflowers, nigella and poppies. She edges her veg beds with calendula and violas, with a wigwam of sweet peas in the middle for pollinators as well as picking. Over winter, snowdrops, hellebores and daphne create seasonal displays.
While her busiest sowing time is March and April, juggling seed trays in her small greenhouse, it’s a year-round activity. This month’s priorities are to sow half-hardy annuals direct into the soil, and biennial flowers, such as foxgloves, sweet william and honesty. By late summer, she is starting next year’s hardy annuals, and in autumn is collecting seed, moving self-sown seedlings and sowing perennials.
“There is so much variety growing from seed that you’ll never find in any garden centre,” says Clare. “And it’s not just an easy thing to do, it’s also incredibly therapeutic as the whole cycle of sowing is full of hope and promise. It’s become an addiction for me and I think, once tried, anyone can get the bug for it.”
Clare’s seed-sowing choices for flowers this year and next:
Sow direct by early May.
Antique, burgundy hues.
Double flowers of pale red fading to lime.
Dusky orange tones.
Sow May-June, for flowers next year.
Rachel grows thousands of roses for weddings. Her secret is choosing vigorous varieties, which tend to be hybrid teas or floribundas, not English rose types, which are weakened by frequent cutting.
Hard pruning in February improves stem length, plus regular high-potash feed in summer.
Her choices are:
Repeat flowering apricot flowers and gorgeous scent; healthy and happy in all weather.
Coral pink cabbage rose that’s scented but tough – longer vase life than most.
Blush pink hybrid tea, compact and fragrant. Good disease resistance and vase life.
Join Rachel Siegfried’s Garden to Vase workshops at her Oxfordshire farm from May to September (£230).
Watch Clare Foster’s course How to Grow Flowers from Seed (5 hours, £127).
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