Garden view
celebrate the seasons with flowers cut fresh from the garden, says helen Billiald
Cut flowers make a home, declares Helen Billiald. So don’t hold back when sowing!
My view of flowers for the home was transformed in 2002 when Sarah Raven’s Grow Your Own Cut Flowers was published. Instead of seeing flower arranging as a slightly dusty formal affair reserved for old ladies in large country houses, Sarah’s book presented it as something as fresh and colourful as the British countryside on a spring morning, altogether easier and more relaxed. I was hooked. I tracked down Antirrhinum majus ‘Night and Day’, Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’ and lime green Euphorbia oblongata and promised myself that one day I too would create a hanging globe of 200 Ammi majus stems. (Sixteen years later I’ve still not managed that globe. But I did sow a ridiculous number of Ammi visnaga in spring – perhaps I’ll manage it this year?) Sowing cut flowers is still an imperative for me. My house may be a bit worn around the edges, but as long as there’s a jug of flowers on the kitchen table it feels like a loved and lived-in home. Besides, growing your own cut flowers is wonderfully thrifty and gives you access to a level of profusion that’s beyond the budget of all except those with very deep pockets. It doesn’t take many ammi plants to pick a bouquet reminiscent of a country lane. Sow a mix of annual amaranthus, cosmos, calendula, cerinthe, sweet peas, helianthus and antirrhinum and you’ll have jam jars of colour every week for months. For the indecisive, or naturally curious, you can sow yourself a different palette every year.
Rainbow exuberance
I grow colours for cutting that would never make it through the garden gate under ‘normal’ circumstances. Thanks to this rainbow exuberance, the children are more inclined to get involved too. Give them a seed catalogue and they’ll spend an age adding sticky notes to their favourites. Cosmos and zinnias come out on top; my daughter worships zinnia ‘Luminosa’ partly because it sounds like a Harry Potter incantation. Not that there’s a separate cutting patch in our garden. I grow lines of flowers between my veg, which not only makes the kitchen garden look beautiful, but it attracts beneficial insects and pollinators too. I have no qualms about cutting everything in sight. You get to know plants really well when you grow them under your nose like this. There are no flamboyant border neighbours for them to hide behind, and if they’re sitting in a vase on your kitchen table, you can’t help but give them your full attention. Just as fruit and vegetables map out the year, so cut flowers weave their way across the weeks and months. Easter means dozens of daffodils spread across the house and bunches of Anemone coronaria De Caen on bedside tables. June is an armful of foxgloves to surprise my daughter on her birthday and September brings buckets of dahlias to sell at the school gate. Best of all are the unprompted jam jar posies with crumpled sweet peas and cornflowers the children bring inside as gifts. Flower rituals to hang the year upon and make a house a home.
Helen Billiald is a garden writer with a PhD in Ecology and an MSc in Pest Management. She’s currently taming her walled garden in Somerset
“My daughter worships zinnia ‘Luminosa’ partly because it sounds like a Harry Potter incantation”