You don’t need to live in the countryside or have acres of space to start a cutting garden
Amy Merrick consults the expert growers at The Real Flower Company on her new West London cutting garden.
To cut or not to cut — that is the real gardener’s question. My duelling natures battle out this problem every winter when the seed catalogues hit the doormat with a whoosh. With a small city garden, sunny spots are in high demand and every flower counts. The purist in me knows that a few dozen snipped for a bouquet could clear me out entirely, reducing a seasonal display to crumbs. The hedonist, on the other hand, knows that there is nothing on earth more luxuriant than doing just that. What is a flower lover to do, short of throwing it all away to find a walled garden to heap with peonies and hollyhocks?
I turn, of course, to someone wiser.
Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Co. with the flower that launched her business: the rose. Last year, she celebrated three decades of growing.
On a sunny morning back in September, when the garden roses were in their blousy, second flush, but the hydrangea was just starting to speckle pink with age, I met flower-grower Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Co. on her farm in Hampshire for a day of revelling in the late summer’s bounty. She and her son Alistair were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the business, hosting a bevy of flower-lovers to tour the farm and feast on a luscious lunch from Tart London. The Real Flower Co. is a forerunner of the modern English cut flower movement, prioritising fragrant, old-fashioned varieties using ecological growing methods — and while Rosebie’s business has bloomed into something of an empire, with a robust business of bouquets by post, multiple farms and London shops, her roots as a grower started simply and her wisdom could inspire even my small-scale garden to produce more.
As we walked through the flower fields, the sun, ever a fickle friend, gave way to showers, and calls for brollies and spare mackintoshes rang out over the rosehips. Those with too-stylish footwear were resoundingly punished, but glasses of English sparkling wine from neighbouring vineyard Raimes put everything back to rights. The farm was verdant and tousled with flowers, a working endeavour rather than simple photo backdrop, with tender annuals cheek-by-jowl with perennials; flowering shrubs alongside herbs; and foliage in polytunnels. The key to a well-rounded, generous selection of cut flowers is a wide range of types of plants — not simply swathes of big bodacious blooms.
These sodden winter days I’m planning the small, sunny south-facing garden outside our new home in the wilds of West London, and while my walled garden visions will have to wait, I’m more determined than ever to just cut some flowers already. I’ll be following Rosebie’s lead and making my approach a many-pronged one. I already have huge, well-established sage and rosemary bushes in need of a good prune, and they make for excellent, fragrant foliage in bouquets. Cut flowers typically worship the sun, so I will focus on those exposed spots in our otherwise neglected garden, adding in much-needed compost to the London clay soil to improve drainage.
The writer's previous London garden — and some of what she was able to harvest from it, below.
There will be a lusty order from Trevor White Roses while it’s still bareroot season, focusing mainly on climbers to make vertical gains on the garden’s brick walls. The repeat-flowering varieties will give months of blooms, and Rosebie started the Real Flower Co growing exclusively roses, so they are known to be a gateway drug. I will proceed with reckless abandon.
I have already sifted through Chilterns Seed’s catalogue and circled the easiest-to-grow, annual cut flowers that go from seed to bloom in a single season. Cosmos 'Purity’ ticks all my boxes — an elegant, old-fashioned shape, tall enough to hold its own in the garden, but so graceful when displayed in a vase. Ammi majus is brilliant in both a border (its lace-like flower heads look very appealing threaded through permanent planting) and a glass vessel. When it comes to fragrance, nothing beats the feathery, pink Dianthus plumarius ‘Rainbow Loveliness’. Pop it in a pot in a sunny spot, and a single stem on your nightstand to perfume the whole bedroom. And for the truly lazy, there are nasturtiums whose little kernels can just be pushed directly into the earth and forgotten about. You will be unfairly rewarded with cascades of jewel-toned gems until the first frost. I particularly fancy the climbing sort, such as Tropaeolum majus 'Milkmaid'. A warning: they will heave themselves over a fence like our neighbour's cat if given half a chance.
Dahlias are a must if you have the sun and I surely won’t be able to resist a few tubers. (Seattle! Santa Claus! Who comes up with these names?) Then there are the lilies and bulbs I’ve dug from our old garden, too, without mentioning the daphne I’m after, and oh, should we get a Philadelphus? It is a dangerous, delicious thing to imagine a cutting garden in winter — similar to going food shopping while ravenous. You might as well just add another packet of seeds to your virtual shopping basket and figure it out later. This year the vases, fingers crossed, will be full.
