A beginners' guide to cut flowers

Garden designer Lottie Delamain examines the most common mistakes gardeners make when cutting flowers, and advises on how to avoid them

Orange ‘Fire King’ wallflowers and reddish-purple ‘Slawa’, ‘Merlot’ and ‘Rem’s Favourite’ tulips in Sarah Raven's cutting garden.

Dean Hearne

For lots of us, being able to cut flowers for the mantlepiece or to take to a friend for dinner is a key motivation for having a garden at all. A simple posey of sweet peas, an outrageous bunch of dahlias or just a few sprigs of greenery for the Sunday lunch table are one of the greatest rewards of the garden. A dedicated cutting garden might feel like a Downton Abbey-style fantasy, but if you’re not blessed with a walled garden specifically to fill vases, there’s no need to panic. In a vase, a flower that may play second fiddle in the border becomes star of their own show. A constellation of bud vases scattered on a window sill with a single stem in each is the perfect way to really get to know the characters in your garden. Even a humble forget-me-not acquires star quality when upgraded to a vase.

However, if generous bunches are the goal, you might want to grow a few extras that can be dotted through borders or even in a dedicated bed ready for snipping on a Friday evening. Here are some valuable lessons to consider when growing flowers for the home.

Start small and choose carefully

There is no plant catalogue more alluring that a cut flower seed catalogue – a kaleidoscope of extremely tempting blooms which can easily lead you astray. Flower farmer and florist Georgie Newbery of Common Farm Flowers in Somerset recommends you design the mixtures you want before you start sowing – what flowers really put a spring in your step on a Monday morning? Which smell divine on your bedside table? And do they all work well together in a vase?

Florist and grower Milli Proust says start small and choose carefully, especially if you’re working on a small plot - “I know our eyes are often bigger than our time, but they’re often bigger than our vases too. You can get a surprising amount from a small space, especially if you grow generous plants like the true ‘cut and come again’ types such as cosmos, zinnias, dahlias and sweet-peas. The more you cut, the more flowers they produce, and cutting them encourages them to keep flowering over a longer period.”

The next trick is remembering what they all are and where you have planted them. Sean Pritchard, who has just released his book on flowers for the home, Outside In, recommends “creating a paper diagram as a record of the varieties that you’ve planted and their position in the garden. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a label and not being able to remember the name of a show-stopping flower.”

Don’t forget filler – it’s easy to get carried away with the thriller, but filler is just as important. Having lovely foliage or less showy but prolific flowers to mix in with the show-stoppers makes for a more natural posey and means blooms go further. Think about perennials here – plants that have a permanent residency in the garden and double as extras for vases. Plus, as Camila Romain from Wolves Lane Flower Company points out, perennials are much better at weathering tough climates than annuals.

I have Alchemilla mollis in the garden and I allow it to self-seed everywhere because those lime green clouds are just so great in bunches through the summer. Pritchard is fond of Nasturtiums, not just for their flowers, but the foliage too, in particular Nasturtium ‘Jewel of Africa’ which “has mottled leaves and is a must for me every year”.

Plan your plot

Camila Romain suggests that whether you have a dedicated cut flower bed or you’re adding to existing borders, planting with diversity in mind and interplanting a mix of species instead of a monocrop, will mean your plants will be more resilient and less susceptible to pests. Plus it will look better too.

As with any other gardening, perhaps more so as you’re cutting, you need to plan for succession – Georgie Newbery points out that “varieties which flower in May and June won’t still be flowering in September – so be prepared to sow/plant in succession for long season success” because unless it’s a cut and come again variety, having filled a jug for the kitchen table, there will be a gap. Sean Pritchard suggests mapping this out at the start of the season, so you have something to fill in the gap once your vases are full.

Rows of tall Delphinium ‘Strawberry Fair’ tower above a sea of annuals, including mixed cornflowers and antirrhinums in Polly Nicholson's cut-flower field.

Britt Willoughby Dyer

Don’t forget to condition

Having done the hard work of sowing and growing, to get the best out of your flowers, they should be cut at “the extremes of the day” says Pritchard – early morning or evening. They should go straight into luke warm water and if possible, left somewhere cool and dark to rest for a few hours or overnight before putting them on display.

Finally – what everyone agrees on is that enjoyment is paramount. Picking flowers from the garden is almost as good as it gets – it’s not about perfection, it’s about experimentation. All mistakes are a garden lesson well learned, and an opportunity for something else to take their turn in the vase.

Favourite flowers for cutting

Annuals
  • Sweet Peas – I love the deep burgundy “Beaujolais” and intensely fragrant ‘Charlie’s Angel’, but a dolly mixture picked up at a plant sale is never a mistake. A classic cut and come again, they need to be watered regularly and you must keep picking them to keep receiving.
  • Cosmos – another great cut and come again. The pure white ‘Purity’ is a classic, and Milli Proust has some gorgeous more unusual varieties such as ‘Apricotta’ on her website Alma Proust. Pricking them out early on is essential to get study generous stems. Great for filling gaps in the border.
  • Nasturtium – although an annual, you will only ever need to sow these once, as they self seed and return generously. I have them in the veg patch where they perform double duty as ground cover. Sean Pritchard loves ‘Jewel of Africa’, I love ‘Ladybird Rose’ with red smudges.
Perennials
  • Knautia Macedonica – a deep burgundy scabious, which is so generous and prolific, I never mind cutting it. It’s a great colour and shape to mix in with other flowers – from pinks through to sharp limes
  • Alchemilla Mollis – a great low growing plant for edge of the border, or cracks in paving. The lime green sprays of flowers take the saccharine edge off peachy tones, and pep up pinks .
  • Dahlias – I have never met a Dahlia I didn’t like, but Labyrinth is a great pink with a hint of apricot, and the spikey star-shaped Honka varieties a wonderful contrast to the heavy-headed dinner plates.