10 Best Places to Start
If I’m being honest, the part I remember most from the earliest days of this floral journey is the overwhelm. I had all of the information in the world, and hadn’t yet developed the understanding of it all enough to order it and execute it with any kind of ease. I kept a million notebooks. I am a list maker to begin with, but the introduction of all of this new information escalated the panic in my head exponentially. I specifically remember despairing that I would never be able to remember all of the things about each of these flowers and being awe-struck by how other growers were able to manage it all. I still am awe-struck about other farmers, but the panic has subsided and has been replaced with a healthy recall of all of the varieties of flowers that combine to make beautiful cut flower arrangements.
Rather than throw all of the information at you about all the flowers, I figured I would start with the 10 best places to start if you want to grow a summer cutting garden that will consistently generate beautiful bouquets for your friends or for a small flower stand operation.
To begin, let’s break this down into two major categories: focal flowers and fillers. They are just as they seem. Focal flowers are your larger, more central, usually round blooms. Fillers come in a few different shapes - lines, umbels, clusters - and fill in the space between our focal flowers. When it comes to building bouquets, you probably want to include some greenery as well, but so much of that is easily foraged that I won’t spend any time here chatting about it.
You don’t need a ton of space to grow a few of each of these plants to cut from all summer long. There’s no reason you couldn’t make it work in a few containers on a sunny deck or porch either, so don’t let complicated light or garden situations get you down.
So without further ado, I give you the 10 Best Places to Start if you want to grow a little summer cutting garden for yourself:
Focals:
Cosmos
Zinnias
Sunflowers
Dahlias
Fillers:
Snapdragon
Feverfew
Amaranth
Celosia
Gomphrena
Statice
I’ll write more in detail about each of these over the next couple of days, but these are all very straightforward, accomplishable flowers that grow themselves if given the appropriate environments. As easy as it comes.
