The big picture

It’s tempting to fill the house with fresh flowers from the garden, but even more satisfying to enjoy them where they grow, writes MICHAEL McCOY

Ican’t tell you how many times I’ve hovered over my daffodils or my tulips, secateurs poised to gather flowers for indoors, only to turn away empty-handed. I can’t do it. As much as love flowers inside, I love them more in situ.

I’ve often gone to a lot of trouble to place these flowers effectively. The tulips that most often stay my hand are yellow and white, drifting under a white-flowering crabapple, and backed up (in the distance, where it’s always pleasantly out of focus in a photo) with several lime-gold euphorbias in bloom. No amount of careful arranging inside could match the power of this perfect cameo.

It’s a conundrum all gardeners share. Virtually every new design client I have tells me they want to be able to pick flowers for the house, and I’m stuck with the dilemma of whether to get real with them right from the start and tell them that: 1) only the biggest gardens can make this possible; and 2) even if it’s possible, it’s likely that they won’t have the heart to do it. Given the multi-faceted expectation management that’s involved in the early stages of garden design, I usually leave it for a later discussion or let it sort itself out.

I know the only way I’m going to be able to bring myself to pick a flower with the garden-gravitas and singular power of a tulip is to grow a clump of them in some out-of-the-way spot, among the vegies, for instance, or, if I had one, a cutting garden. Somewhere I won’t miss them once picked.

I was so grateful when my wife insisted that she wanted to grow some roses for picking, and could see immediately that, if grown for this purpose alone, they needed to be placed right out of sight. To me, roses are ugly shrubs. If you’re going to spoil their moment of glory – and the only time they justify room in the garden – by picking all the flowers, they’re better never seen. So she started out planting near the clothesline and has since snaffled a bit of land near the wheelie bins as well. It’s a perfect solution. She never hesitates to pick them free of all their flowers, leaving them looking stripped and threadbare, but it just doesn’t matter.

During the 18th century, when the pastoral and largely non-floral English landscape was coveted, the grand house would have staff members looking after the house flowers alone, which by necessity, would have been grown on site. In order to avoid the rolling green lawns being ‘spoiled’ with flower beds, huge walled gardens were built out of sight of the house for the vegetables and cut flowers.

But until I acquire my several-acre walled garden, my garden tulips will stay firmly where they are, and I’ll happily buy a bunch – that someone else has cut – from the local greengrocer.