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Home > Amy Stewart on Cut Flowers

Amy Stewart on Cut Flowers

I never planned to transform my entire yard into a cutting garden. It happened gradually. A few callas would find their way into a vase in early spring, then some daffodils would turn up on a hall table. After a while the summer roses started coming inside, too. In winter, I'd have hellebore and sprigs of heather.

Once I realized that I could keep a vase filled year-round with flowers I'd grown myself, I was hooked. From then on, the only plants that came home from the nursery were those that had potential as a cut flower.

There is something magical about a garden-grown arrangement that makes it different from the commercially grown roses, lilies and tulips that we buy at the store. Those have their own merits: They are flawless, surprisingly affordable and, because they are bred for longevity, they last much longer in a vase than my garden flowers.

But homegrown blossoms are lovable because of, not in spite of, their imperfections. Sunflowers with missing petals are charming. Roses whose leaves boast perfectly round holes thanks to the work of leafcutter bees have an interesting history. Even gladioli that refuse to stand up straight in the vase are wonderfully rebellious. Who couldn't love a crazy, homemade, one-of-a-kind bouquet?

The trick to designing with garden flowers is to audition every blade, leaf and blossom in your garden. I once saw a gorgeous arrangement that included fresh-picked carrots in a clear glass vase. The vibrant orange roots, submerged in water, were as bright as jewels, and the lacy leaves acted as filler for a few sunny ranunculus. It was wacky and inspired. That's what garden flowers are all about.

Look around the garden for trees and shrubs with branches to spare. A bare willow branch in winter, a cherry branch in bud in early spring, or a lilac or buddleia (butterfly bush) in full bloom can provide a foundation for flower arrangements.

Then take a look at foliage. Calla lily and acanthus leaves are dramatic all by themselves, and the silvery foliage of artemisia or helichrysum is stunning with pale blues and purples, or deep burgundy hues.

Annuals really make a cut-flower garden, but think beyond zinnias and snapdragons. What about the nigellas (love-in-a-mist) that self-sow freely until they threaten to consume every last inch of the garden? They're gorgeous at any stage of their growth, and once they've gone to seed, the pods will hold up in a vase for weeks. How about nasturtiums, or the California native Clarkia elegans? The best annual cut flowers are almost like weeds: You cut them because you have to; if you didn't, they'd take over.

But most of all, I'm in love with the perennials that need to be trimmed anyway to continue blooming. There's no more rewarding outdoor chore than walking through the garden with a pair of pruning shears and a jar half-filled with water, cutting and arranging as you go.

For example, fiery red and pink pelargoniums (geranium) make surprisingly good cut flowers. Try filling a few jars with them and bringing them to a party. They're breathtaking on their own, and the plants themselves will reward you by producing more blooms.

Penstemon is also underrated as a cut flower. The trumpet-shaped flowers come in shades of blue, purple, red, pink and white; the plants demand regular cuttings to thrive and are surprisingly low maintenance, preferring poor, dry soils and shrugging off pests and disease.

Catmint, yarrow, feverfew and herbs like dill or fennel also bloom more if they're cut regularly. They can be used as fillers in a bouquet or they can stand alone. Even ornamental grasses need a haircut once in a while. Why not try them in a vase before they end up in the compost pile?

Go for fragrance

What happens when you hand a bouquet of flowers to people? They smell them. Everyone wants flowers to smell good, but a fragrant commercially produced flower is hard to come by.

Why? The production of scent is closely tied to vase life. It's costly for a flower to manufacture fragrance; it saps energy and shortens its life. Now botanists have discovered that fragrance is also related to the production of ethylene, a gas generated by the plants themselves to speed ripening and seed formation. Over the years, as flower breeders have worked to breed flowers that live longer in the vase, they have inadvertently bred out scent. Many garden flowers, on the other hand, have never lost their fragrance.

Sweet peas are worth growing year-round; there is nothing more delightful than a few graceful stems, their tendrils and leaves still attached, in a bud vase. Or crowd them together in a wide-mouthed jar. Either way, they simply won't keep blooming unless you cut them. Plant in compost-enriched soil, water every few weeks with fish emulsion, and keep putting new seeds in the ground. Most nurseries offer a selection of both winter-hardy and heat-tolerant varieties so that Bay Area gardeners can keep them going all year.

Heliotrope is an underappreciated Victorian flower that was once very popular in nosegays. It gives off a sweet vanilla scent and will grow into a medium-size shrub. It'll also live happily in a container, and the dark purple flowers hold up well in a vase.

Jasmine may not live long in the vase, but it will be entirely worth your while. My pink jasmine climbs up trellises, sprawls on the ground and generally gets out of hand. But I just snip off the unruly vines and put them in water. It only takes two or three blossoms to perfume the room.

Finally, don't overlook scented leaves. I've added fat rose-scented geranium leaves to bouquets, as well as pineapple sage, lavender and verbena. In the winter, I like to bring in woody fragrances like rosemary and pine.

Keep arrangements simple

A garden bouquet doesn't demand elaborate design skills. Put each kind of flower in a separate container and you might just be done. Ornamental grasses, for example, are very striking on their own. A tomato vine might need nothing more than an old pasta sauce jar filled with water to turn it into a picnic centerpiece. You can also group flowers by color, keeping pastel blues and lavenders in one arrangement and saving hot oranges and reds for another. Or gather them by shape: Put spiky branches and wiry tall purple verbena together, and you have a vertical design element.

If you limit arrangements to three varieties, it will hardly matter what those three varieties are because simplicity and repetition create good design, both in the vase and in the garden. What matters about garden bouquets is the experimentation.

Some people bring a bottle of wine to a party; some bring a tidy little cellophane-wrapped bouquet of roses. I bring a bucket of garden flowers. Sometimes these flowers, like uninvited guests, are rowdy, messy and a little out of place. But I don't go anywhere without them.

Amy Stewart, Special to The Chronicle, Wednesday, March 7, 2007
 
   

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