How to cultivate beautiful cut flowers in the smallest city gardens

They serve her well, because she is a bespoke florist as well as a planting designer. Her sage-green potting shed is where she creates bespoke bouquets and hand-tied bunches picked from her garden, supplementing them out of season with dawn raids on the New Covent Garden Flower Market.

“I’m on a mission to get everyone growing their own cut flowers,” says Duster, who presses the point in her book, Urban Flowers: Creating Abundance In A Small City Garden.

“It’s so easy. Just buy a few seed packets and get sowing. Through trial and error, you’ll find what works best. You don’t need a big garden. Most flowers I grow are fine in pots, crates and window boxes

RANDOM GARDENING
Duster belongs to the random school of gardening, because she covered most of her back garden with gravel, so that everything would self-seed and pop up everywhere, which it does, especially the foxgloves.

Aside from half-hardy annuals, which she starts about now in sheltered trays, she sows hardy annuals by pushing aside a bit of gravel, scattering the seed and pushing back the gravel.

“Germination is quick because the gravel keeps the ground warmer. I fit a lot in because I space the seeds more closely than recommended.”

Her stalwarts include Black Beauty opium poppies, which she grows for their showy seedheads, clary sage, cornflowers and ice-green nicotiana. Cosmos is renowned for pumping out flowers all summer, and Punsters choice is bright pink Antiquity.

For impact, she grows the huge allium Globe master and displays them solo. Roses she grows in deep pots. “My favourite is Blush Noisette, which has small, fragrant, pale pink pompom heads. It’s important to use compact varieties in small spaces, so follow the breeders’ advice.”

FRAGRANT FOLIAGE

Foliage is more important than flowers. “You always need much more foliage than you think you’ll need. A lot of green in a bouquet makes the composition look natural.”

Her leaf list is acid-green Euphorbia oblongata, which needs stems seared in boiling water to stop the sap irritating skin, evergreen ferns, Alchemilla mollis and florists’ favourite, Bupleurum rotundifolium, which even has a little green flower.

For More Information:- Pattie Barron

The Best Sweet Peas For Cutting

Lured in by their perfume as a child, Roger Parsons has been growing sweet peas for more than 30 years. He now holds a National Collection of 1,300 varieties of Lathery odorous and every year he grows 200 or 300 different varieties. He is always on the lookout for standout characteristics – an ­unusual color, a very long stem, a higher than average number of flowers, or a noticeably longer flowering season.

Drawing on the National Collection’s gene pool, Parsons has bred for these ­attributes, hybridizing again and again, and has produced many sweet pea varieties ­including some that are now famous. One of his favorites, which he has sold for years, is ‘Aphrodite’, a ­beautiful pure white, perfect for wedding bouquets. He also bred ‘Frances Kate’, named after his daughter, a blue striped form which we’ve grown and loved in my garden at Perch Hill for the past three years. This is Parsons’s favorite striped variety.

Last summer, in the walled garden at Parham House in West Sussex, Parsons trialed 50 sweet peas. He had sat down with Tom Brown, the head gardener, and together they made a selection with the aim of finding out which would make the best cut flowers to be picked and ­arranged to decorate Parham House. 

Parsons and Brown selected from the Spencer varieties first. These were traditionally bred for cutting, with long, straight stems and lots of large ­flowers. Parsons also wanted to show off the ever-­increasing range of ­different characteristics you now get with sweetmeats, so he also chose a few of the more recently bred multi flora types, some of which are patterned with stripes, some flakes, some bi-coursers and some hot-off-the-­breeding-bench acacia-leaved types.

The multifloras were quite something. Most sweetpeas in my garden have three or four flower heads to a stem, but these had five or more, and Parsons says he’s counted a few with up to 12. This not only means big ­impact, but also that each stem gives you a longer show – both in the garden and as a cut flower. The lowest bloom might be fading after a few days, but the upper ones will just be starting to open, so these multifloras have almost double the average vase life.

Anything with Bouquet in its name (I loved ­‘Bouquet Crimson’) hails from this group, so they’re worth looking out for, but Parsons’s top recommendation is ‘Malory’, with flowers in a ­coral, orange-pink, usually six blooms to a stem. For the new and exciting, acacia-leaved form, Parsons chose ‘Jacko’. This sub-group has no tendrils. Flower arrangers love to hate the sweet pea tendril because they latch on to the stems above and bend them down, creating those irritating “knees” we all know too well because they make the flowers ­impossible to arrange. 

If you’re growing for cut flowers or the show bench, tendrils must be removed to prevent stems being discarded, which is a huge job. Without tendrils you have to tie sweet peas to their supports, but the stems won’t become distorted.  

The Parham trial was planted in a 150ft south-facing bed on the edge of the walled garden. Every individual ­variety was grown on its own silver birch 7ft dome, with wood harvested in February and March from the estate. En mass, they looked magnificent for months and went down very well with the visitors.

Sweetpeas have never fallen out of favor with gardeners, but with breeding programmers such as ­Parsons’s they are taking on a whole new lease of life and are once again one of our most popular flowers. The multi flora sweet peas may not give you quite the room-filling scent of the older forms, but you can pick a jug of cut ­flowers that will last a week and take pride of place on your kitchen table. 

For More Information:- Sarah Raven