Have you ever wanted to grow your own cutting garden? You’re in luck! I not only have 3 tips to grow flowers in your backyard garden, but I also have 3 Essential Gardening Tools To Get The Job Done.
The planning starts now!
If you love fresh slow grown flowers as much as I do, I bet you can’t wait to start planning a cutting garden. Fresh seasonal bouquets are such a beautiful gift to my home and family.
To be fair, a cutting garden is a process that requires plenty of research. The flower catalogs have arrived, and soon I’ll need to start making decisions about what my brides will want me to incorporate in their wedding bouquets. For the most part, I think my style has developed through practice and experimentation using flowers from my cottage style garden.
The process of creating flower bouquets starts during these planning months. My combination of picking flowers for their color, texture, and size is all part of creating a beautiful cutting garden that is balanced. It’s at that point all the elements must work together. If they do, then they should work together in a bouquet.
Decide what flowers you want in your bouquets!
This year I’ll be adding more Roses. I can’t seem to get enough of them either in the garden or for wedding bouquets. There is nothing more spectacular than a rose in full bloom. Imagine your cottage garden brimming with these delightful massive flower heads that are bursting with color. I love filling a bowl chuck full of fresh cut roses and placing it so that you can’t miss the arrangement when you enter a room.
Last year I added fifteen plants in my cutting garden. You may ask why, as a florist, would I make such an investment to grow my roses when I could easily use roses grown in South America? It’s essential for me to cultivate my slow flower cutting garden because nothing in my mind compares to a freshly cut garden rose that has been allowed to mature on its stem and picked explicitly for a special event.
Fresh cut flowers grown in a cottage cutting garden are romantically nostalgic and beautiful without compare. A bouquet using carefully grown cottage style garden roses is delightful to hold and smell. But more important because they are not average in any way.
I often take field trips to scout nurseries for plants that I can incorporate in my cutting garden. On one occasion I was visiting a nursery in upstate New York precisely when the mother load of plants arrived. As they came off the truck, I picked my favorites. I also planned our holiday vacation to Canada to pick up Roses from Palatine Roses, a fantastic specimen for our northeastern zone. This year I plan on ordering my roses from Week’s Roses. Last year I planted one of their cutting roses (Bride’s dream), it did so well in the cutting garden, and this year I must get more!
To me, garden roses are the perfect flowers for a cottage style cutting garden in every way. Their sweet aroma brings back memories from my childhood. In my opinion, roses flown in from South America are homogenized and uninteresting, almost like eating bland food from average food chains. My clients thankfully understand the correlation between organic food and organic flowers. In season freshly cut flowers from the garden have sex appeal not found in commercially grown flowers. Any freshly cut flower grown in a nurtured organic garden is magical.
Last season my hand-picked bouquets delighted my brides. Each of the bouquets was unique and whimsical. My slow grown garden flowers add a unique touch to any flower arrangement that can’t be achieved by using commercially grown flowers.
Keep in touch as your garden grows!
I’m here if you’d like to discuss how I can help make your wedding a bit more magical or we can talk about how you can plan on growing your very own cutting garden flowers for your wedding. It’s time for some dirty thinking.
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