Gardening trends: Advice and tips on designing a cutting garden

How to design your cutting garden

If you love having bouquets of fresh flowers in your home, office or to give to friends and family, a cutting garden is for you. Everything a bouquet lover needs for year-round arrangements can be grown in your own cutting garden. Cutting gardens are a great way to enjoy your flowers in the home as well as outdoors – you can have your flowers and pick them, too!

Gardening trends: Advice and tips on designing a cutting garden

Since your cutting garden is basically a production garden and isn’t really intended for display, you can design it to be any size and shape you want. You can fill this area with flowers and foliage that you like and not worry about if the plants or the colors look good together. Your cutting garden is a great place to experiment with new plants and colors that you’ve been meaning to try. When choosing a location remember that most cutting garden plants will prefer full sun. You will also need plenty of room to move around among the plants in order to plant, fertilize, harvest, water and deadhead spent blooms.

Start your cutting garden just like you would any other garden. Pick a sunny, well-drained site and improve the soil with plenty of compost, peat moss, or chopped leaves before you plant anything.

Think about the basic plants you want to have and how you’ll use them in arrangements. Trees or shrubs yield great material for bouquets. Trees with good fall color, shrubs with berries and evergreen plants that supply fragrant boughs work well for fall and winter arrangements. Flowering shrubs are mainstays for the spring cutting garden.

Now that you have the backbones of your garden, fill in with flowers, grasses and foliage of all kinds – annuals, biennials, perennials, bulbs small shrubs and roses.

During spring and summer, it’s easy to have plenty of cutting choices but fall and winter takes a little more planning. For a succession of bloom throughout the growing season in your area, choose plants that blossom in different seasons. For the highest bloom production, plant annuals with early season, mid-season and late season bloomers grouped together. Plant taller plants toward the back of your garden so they won’t shade out shorter varieties of other plants. Don’t forget to add plant supports for those tall stems and heavy flowers. Supports will help keep them standing tall and straight and looking gorgeous in your bouquets.

Picking blossoms regularly is the best way to keep plants blooming throughout the season. Removing faded blossoms (deadheading) also keeps plants from forming seeds, which slows down flowering. While you’re in the garden harvesting and deadheading it is a great time to check for insects and pests that might be attacking your plants and take appropriate action.

When a plant’s main blooming season begins to wind down and it stops flowering, pull them, cultivate the bed, and replant with new seedlings. Pansies are early summer bloomers but they won’t bloom once the days get too hot. You can then replace them with marigolds or zinnias.

When harvesting your blooms, keep in mind that every flower has the perfect stage at which it should be harvested to insure the longest vase life. For beautiful arrangements that last a long time in the vase, cut your flowers during morning or evening hours when it’s cooler.

Once cut, strip off the lower leaves on the stems, so the leaves don’t sit in water. It’s best to re-cut the stems under water to make sure they absorb water easily after harvest. This can be done by keeping a small bowl of water nearby when preparing the flowers and snipping off about a quarter inch of the stem under the water in the bowl. To condition your flowers and even further increase the vase life, plunge the stems into a fifty-fifty solution of lemon-lime soda and water with one or two drops of bleach to the gallon added. You can use this same solution to feed the flowers in the vase, and it will keep well in the refrigerator. Change the water daily in your arrangement and be sure no leaves or flower buds are left underwater in the vase to rot or decay.

Here are some suggestions for plants to go in your cutting garden. Remember, annuals last one year unless they self-seed themselves. Perennials will return year after year to supply you with bouquet material. Biennials will bloom every 2 years, needing a year to grow and a year to bloom. A well thought out cutting garden will contain some of each to keep the blooming season going as long as possible.

ANNUALS: ageratum, Bells of Ireland, calendula, campanula, celosia, cleome, cosmos, dianthus, lisianthis, geranium, gypsophila (baby’s breath), strawflower, nicotiana, pansy, petunia, phlox, scabiosa, snapdragon, statice, sunflower, sweet pea, zinnia

PERENNIALS: yarrow, aster, campanula, carnation, coreopsis. delphinium, dianthus, foxglove, purple coneflower, coral bells, lupine, phlox, poppy, black-eyed Susan, sage, Shasta daisy, veronica

FOLIAGE PLANTS: artemisia, coleus, dusty miller, hosta, lamb’s ears, lavender

TREES AND SHRUBS: juniper, pine, cedar, lilac, mock orange, red twig dogwood, pussy willow, forsythia, magnolia, gardenia, azalea, maple, willow

Now that you’ve planted your cutting garden, do you have more flowers than you can handle? Drop some off at an elderly housing center, hospital, hospice or make arrangements for friends and family. Many of the flowers from the cutting garden will also dry well. Hang them upside down in a cool, dry place to dry. Once dry, spray them with a preservative and use them in dried flower arrangements.