“I know many gardeners share this feeling: cutting flowers is stealing the view and that splendid delphinium, huge pom pom peony, or lupine spear are best left growing outside,” writes world-renowned gardening expert and best-selling author Sarah Raven in her new book, A Year of Cut Flowers: A Life of Growing and Arranging for All Seasons. But if you select the right types—annuals, biennials and dahlias—and pick them correctly at the right time, she says, you actually promote bud formation and create the potential for more flowers. Her credo is: the more you pick, the more they flower.
It’s true that Sarah has no formal floral training, but that means little when you consider she’s had decades of hands-on experience and is the author of 14 books on gardening. To us, she describes herself as “an enthusiast who’s restless yet quite grounded, hard-working and creative, and most at ease in nature with good friends and family, not at a party.”
Over the years Sarah’s obsession with cut flowers has literally and figuratively grown. A Year of Cut Flowers is the culmination of all those decades of planting, growing, picking, assessing, and arranging almost every day (these days with the help of five talented team members): As such, you’ll find plenty of cut flower inspiration and practical advice in the book. In addition, Raven shares how she decides what to grow in the first place, how many to plant, and which plants should be the backbone of any cutting garden, regardless of the size of your garden plot. “There are high-production groups which give you a lot from a little,” she explains. In the book, Sarah also answers everyone’s perennial question about cut flowers: how to make them last. (Her cardinal rule: “don’t pick and plonk. Instead, pick, condition, rest and then arrange.”)
As a devoted fan of growing cut flowers and making flower arrangements, I got giddy reading her book and learning which were the cut-and-come-again plants and which were the easy, top-production cut flowers. I had to ask: which flowers were her favorites? Raven graciously obliged. “Anemones—they flower so very early. Dahlias—they are easy to grow and for their sheer abundance, plus new breeding gives extended vase life. Snapdragons—they provide texture, vase life, and wonderful shapes.”
More than learning the details of planting and cutting, including the notion of growing plants for foliage to add form to an arrangement, her inspiring book is a call to action to both plant something today and cut some flowers and bring them in, whether it’s a large bouquet or a single blossom. The act of bringing beauty inside is a positive, simple, and life-affirming experience. Sarah shares with me, “Sow a packet of seed and you’ll see by next week that you have new members of your ‘family’ that you’ll then get to know over the next few months.”
For more wisdom, listen to Sarah’s weekly podcast Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange, which welcomes guests from the world of horticulture and beyond and gives gardeners the knowledge and practical skills needed to grow their own dream garden.
See also:
- 5 Tips to Try from ‘A Year Full of Pots’, Sarah Raven’s New Book
- Ask The Expert: Sarah Raven’s 10 Tips for a Kitchen Garden
- Garden Visit: Sarah Raven’s Perch Hill
- Quick Takes With: Sarah Raven
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