In Your Garden with Jenny Watts The Cutting Garden If you enjoy having fresh owers in the house,

it makes good sense to grow your own. With your own cutting garden, you can grow the owers you love in the colors you want and make sure you have a selection of owers for cutting most of the year.
Cut owers are as easy to grow as vegetables when grown in blocks of the same kind. Choose plants that bloom for a long period and hold up well in the vase. Make sure you grow owers that bloom at different seasons to have bouquets throughout the year.
In order to receive the maximum production of owers, the garden should receive seven or eight hours of sun a day. The soil should be fertile with good drainage. There are also some owers for cutting that can be grown in light shade, though ower production won't be as great.
If you want to grow cut owers in an ornamental garden, mix annuals and perennials with ornamental grasses, bulbs and roses. Grow at least three plants of each perennial and six of each annual to have enough owers for cutting at one time.
Many of the best annual cut owers are in the daisy family: asters, bachelors button, calendulas, cosmos, dahlias, marigolds, zinnias and sunowers. Some contrasting owers include gladiolus, dianthus, gayfeather, Victoria Blue salvia, snapdragons and stock. Everlastings make great cut flowers for fresh or dried arrangements. Babys breath, globe amaranth, pink candle celosia, yarrow, statice and strawflowers are easy to air-dry without losing their color or form. Some, such as purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans produce bold, bristly seedheads that are nice in dried arrangements.
Perennials from the daisy family include: aster, gaillardia, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans, Shasta daisy and painted daisy. Cup-and-saucer campanula, delphinium, lupine and penstemon offer tall spikes of bold owers. Iris, poppies, peonies, daffodils, lilies, tulips and roses have individual owers to uses as centerpieces of your arrangements. Ornamental grasses add drama to flower arrangements. Use Northern Sea Oats, fountain grass, feather reed grass (Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster'), or Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis) in both modern and country-style arrangements.
For long-lasting cut owers, be sure to include carnations, Peruvian lilies (alstromerias), delphiniums, roses, lilies and sunowers in your cutting garden. Their blooms will last in the vase for 6-14 days. In areas that receive less than two hours of sun a day, you can grow astilbe, columbine, foxglove, and old-fashioned bleeding heart. If your ower bed is under deciduous trees, daffodils and tulips will ower nicely before the trees leaf out in the spring.
Whether you create a cutting garden, or add cut owers to your ornamental ower beds, it's easy to have lots of pretty cut owers to enjoy indoors all season long.