In Bloom

Growing, Harvesting and Arranging Homegrown Flowers All Year Round

Clare Nolan

• Publisher: CompanionHouse Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781620083291
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Horticultura

Learn to design and maintain a bountiful flower garden at home with this comprehensive guide on everything from planting to flower arranging. In this book, brimming with inspirational photographs, interior stylist Clare Nolan reveals her secrets for growing a colorful, fragrant garden and using it to create spectacular floral displays for the home all year-round. Clare takes the mystery out of the growing process, offering clear advice on choosing the right plants for you, laying out your cutting patch, and planning ahead so you get your perfect palette of color, texture and shape, all at the right time. An entire chapter on arranging will inspire you to create spectacular arrangements for your home without the need for complicated floristry techniques. Being able to step out of the back door and pick a single stem for beside the bed, pull together a posy for a friend or create a colorful centerpiece is an exciting and rewarding addition to the home gardening experience. This volume covers:

• How to choose your plants, position your patch and grow luxurious flowers
• Cultivation tips for annuals, biennials, bulbs, corms, tubers, rhizomes, perennials, shrubs, trees, climbers, foliage and fillers
• When and how to harvest—and how to make your flowers last longer
• Styling guide for stunning arrangements that look like they came from a shop
• Expert advice from an experienced interiors stylist and lifestyle editor

1 Getting started

Choosing your blooms

This is your chance to dream – there’ll be plenty of time to think about the practicalities later. It’s time to think about which flowers make your heart sing and imagine the blooms that will be filling the vases in your home. For me, it’s all about being able to grow things you can’t buy in shops easily – or, if you can, they are hard to come by and expensive.

BECOME A MODERN-DAY PLANT HUNTER

Track down flowers that you love in friends’ gardens, or that you see at horticultural shows. Let your heart (and nose) guide you, not a catalog – colors can be misleading in print (as can the sometimes lofty descriptions). One of my prized flowers for cutting is Rosa ‘Yves piaget’, a ridiculously blousy rose with a heady scent that stopped me in my tracks on a work trip to Paris once and now has pride of place in my cutting patch.

TAKE INTO ACCOUNT YOUR PERSONAL STYLE

Go for what you love rather than following trends. In the past I’ve grown certain flowers because I felt I should, because they were the color or flower of the moment and all over Instagram. It’s simple: if you don’t really love something, you won’t bother picking it. Save yourself the time and energy and use the precious growing space for something you chose from the heart.

BE AWARE OF YOUR SIGNATURE COLORS

If your home is floor-to-ceiling muted heritage colors and your wardrobe a sea of neutrals, you may want to reflect that in your palette of plants. Having said that, don’t let personal style and home decor limit your choice; a bucket of cottagey flowers can work as well in a modern scheme as a traditional country one. Let your heart lead you and you won’t go far wrong.

BE OPEN-MINDED

The fruiting branches of red currants and raspberries, a trail of nasturtiums, or a stem of not-quite-ripe tomatoes all look just as beautiful in an arrangement as a typical cut flower does. Be brave and try something new to you, even if everyone else thinks it a little eccentric. If you grow your own fruit and veg, or can persuade someone who does to let you raid their patch, try out berries and tomatoes, and give raspberry leaves, dill, fennel, basil, angelica, and apple mint a go – they add another layer of scent.

Discovering dahlias at a flower show.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ‘Silver Spring’ allium; Luciano Giubbilei’s stunning planting at Chelsea Flower Show many years ago inspired me to plant ‘Buckeye Belle’ peony and bronze fennel in my cutting garden; Dahlias at a flower show; I keep sketchbooks where I’ll make notes of any inspiring ideas I come across.

What makes a good cut flower?

The beauty of growing your own cut flowers is that you don’t have the same constraints as commercial growers: there’s no transportation involved that could damage delicate petals; no market forces dictating one color is in and another out. There’s no supplier demanding a certain stem length or blooms that last for a minimum of ten days or the worry of something not being profitable or too labor intensive. However, there are certain traits that will make one flower more appealing than another, both in terms of its performance in the garden and as a cut flower.

IN THE VASE

STEM LENGTH The longer the stem, the more versatile it is. Avoid any varieties than are labelled “compact” or “dwarf” as they may limit how you can arrange your blooms. Some short growers are still worth it for me: muscari and lily of the valley fall into this category.

LONGEVITY Some flowers simply don’t last long. Sometimes, their fleeting beauty is enough. You’ll be lucky if sweet peas are still looking good after five days, while you may only get a day from some of the most highly scented garden roses once they’ve hit full bloom. Choosing the right variety can help extend vase life.

SHEDDING

There are flowers that leave what seems like a trail of destruction in your home: the pollen from some lilies can stain furnishings or clothing when it falls; and catkins shed and deposit a thin layer of pollen dust on surfaces. Then there’s spring blossom that blooms and quickly shatters to leave a confetti-like trail through the house as you take it out to the compost bin. I still bring all of these indoors for their beauty, and the price I pay is the cleanup afterwards – only you can decide if it’s worth it.

IN THE GARDEN

It’s important to remember that you’re not creating a “garden” in the traditional sense – you’re planting to harvest the blooms and foliage. How the plants look while growing shouldn’t be your primary concern (unless of course you’re going to be planting for cutting within your existing garden borders), but it’s useful to think about how plants perform in the garden in terms of growth. How easy are they to grow? Are they resistant to disease or pests? How quick are they to get to harvest stage? How long can you cut them for? Keep these questions at the back of your mind when flicking through the catalogs.

THINK BEYOND CLASSIC “BLOOMS”

Growing your own means a whole other world of ingredients is open to you. An arching stem of glossy rosehips, an explosion of frothy grass, or a bunch of aromatic leaves are all ingredients worthy of the vase. Think like a florist and start to see anything as fair game.

A table full of early autumnal bounty, ready for one of my one-to-one classes, includes the last of the roses, precious tuberose, and zinnias with masses of seasonal foliage and fillers.

Think in terms of ingredients

When I first started growing flowers for cutting, it was passion led; I planted what I loved without any real planning. It worked to a degree. I had lots of beautiful blooms – roses that smelled divine, glorious armloads of tulips, and fistfuls of sweet peas – but I struggled to put together bouquets and mixed arrangements as I didn’t have the quantities of foliage or fillers to mix with them. I now work backwards from the displays I want to create and think in terms of the ingredients I’ll need, with everything I plant playing an important role within my displays. When building a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• My love affair with flowers
• 1 Getting Started
• 2 Annuals & Biennials
• 3 Bulbs
• 4 Perennials, Shrubs & Trees
• 5 Foliage & Fillers
• 6 Harvesting & Arranging
• Resources
• Index
• Acknowledgments