By ALLISON WATKINSFriday, July 24, 2009
Nothing brightens up a room or freshens up a home more than newly picked flowers.
Many gardeners love to bring in their prized flowers by creating cut flower arrangements from their landscape plants, but a lot of us can’t afford to make that sacrifice. In many landscapes, it would require cutting down all the flowers to be able to create a good bouquet or vase, and we don’t want to give up what adds to the landscape in order to have flowers inside.
Cut flowers can provide a lot of variety and color to the inside of a home, can make nice gifts for friends or can be used for special occasions. But to have a good stock of them without devastating your landscape, a special flower-cutting garden may be required. A cut-flower garden simply is a plot of certain types of flowering plants that go well in arrangements and bouquets. Surprisingly, cut-flower gardens do not have an appealing look in the landscape.
Instead, they have more of a utility look and are best tucked away in a sunny corner of the backyard or incorporated into the vegetable garden.
There should be a wide variety of plants, including annuals, perennials and bulbs. Also, have different sizes, shapes and colors; plant an assortment ranging from long-stemmed to round flowers. Don’t forget filler flowers like baby’s breath.
Great cut flowers include plants like hyacinth, gerber daisy, shasta daisy, rudbeckia, sunflowers, cosmos, daffodil, snapdragons and marigolds. Some good things to include for fall arrangements would be chrysanthemums and autumn joy sedum.
Good flower arrangements should include some foliage plants, and these can be incorporated throughout the landscape or placed in the cut-flower garden. Ornamental grasses go well in flower arrangements, as do ferns like wood fern or holly fern.
When planting the garden, simply plant rows like a vegetable garden would be arranged. It should be located in full sun and near a water source for easy irrigating.
When cutting the flowers to bring inside, take a bucket of lukewarm water along to place the flower stems in as they are cut. It is best to pick them during the coolest part of the day, and make sure they are watered adequately and are not wilting.
Cut-flower gardens are not hard to care for; they just need regular watering and possibly fertilizer (do a soil test through the extension office to determine requirements).
Adding cut flowers to a vegetable garden is easy to do, and can be very rewarding. Be sure to consider planting some this fall.
Allison Watkins is Tom Green County Extension horticulturist. Contact her at AEWatkins@ag.tamu.edu.
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