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The cutting garden

When Rachel Petheram got married in 2002, she was so disappointed with the wedding flowers available that she decided, rather determinedly, to grow her own. She grew cornflowers, sweet peas, cow parsley and herbs, and impressed guests at the event so much that friends started to ask her to grow wedding flowers for them as well.

Gradually her kitchen garden became a cutting garden, and soon demand for Catkin Flowers - as her business became known - started outstripping the plot she had. She began growing flowers in the kitchen garden at Doddington Hall near Lincoln, and here’s her gorgeous plot.

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Rachel’s top tips for starting a cutting garden:

  • Don’t be put off by lack of space: you don’t need much space at all to grow cut flowers. 2m x 2m would be plenty.
  • You could incorporate your cut flowers into your existing borders but then they become part of the design of the garden/border and it can be difficult to cut them as they look so nice.
  • They key is to treat them like a crop that needs harvesting and also to choose plants that you have to cut in order to keep them flowering, so annuals and dahlias are perfect.
  • Choose a site that is in the sun and sheltered from strong winds and that has easy access to water.
  • In terms of what you grow: anything you like! But make sure you grow plenty of foliage as this is always the limiting factor for any flower arrangement.
  • Space is always limited so I grow loads of herbs which are multi-functional in the garden, culinary as well as fantastic for bouquets etc.
  • My perfect mini cutting garden would have a rose, a catmine, a culinary mint, an obelisk for sweet peas, 2 or 3 cornflower plants, 1 or 2 cosmos, 4 or 5 annual scabious and 3 or 4 dahlias.

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Top five cutting flowers:

  1. Sweet peas
  2. Cornflowers
  3. Scabious
  4. Any herb
  5. Dahlias

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Unusual cut flowers:

  1. Catmint
  2. Horseradish
  3. Cow parsley
Visit Rachel’s marvellous website for more inspiration and to order flowers from her.

 

 

 

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