THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Cut Flower Garden
If you don’t want to grow veg, grow flowers. A cut flower garden is a brilliant way to use your bit of the world.
This is not a post about how to set it up – to do that, read these books…
The Cutting Garden: Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers
The Cut Flower Patch: Grow your own cut flowers all year round
Nor is this a rant about the cut flower industry (no need to rant, just read this book by Amy Stewart Gilding the Lily: Inside the Cut Flower Industry
This is a blog about using the land you have in a way that might just thrill you.
(For those of you just starting out and in need of tools and plants, the advert below takes you to the best source for beginners – the Sarah Raven website. They also normally have a sale on, so make use of it!)
Like this client cut flower garden, growing your own blooms is a beautiful job.
What makes it beautiful is that it is not easy. You are required to think logically (if I plant this now, here, I can harvest then, and replace it with this…) and creatively (I don’t have the space for that much stock, unless… unless I grow them in gutters pinned to the wall…) and, as with anything rewarding, you must be able to balance the two extremes.
Going gung-ho is fine, but nuance, subtlety and thinking smart will lead you to inspiration.
It’s not just mental but physical too. A great benefit of growing your own flowers is that you get exercise. This is not exercise for competition (who can be faster, stronger, bendier, tougher.) This is not shoddy, ‘I’m running on a treadmill with the aircon on’ exercise, but legitimate and worthwhile movement that stretches and strengthens your muscles.
It is exercising for health.
The final great reason for having a cut flower garden is that you become a creator. You are weaving together a number of different materials and turning them into somethng even more valuable. That is a fantastic way to spend your time.
Think more widely (nationally, at least) and imagine if every household in the country had a cut flower garden. That a view of the UK from the sky would be a picture of highly productive, intensely flower packed gardens. A bee haven and a butterfly paradise? Of course.
It is a job that makes you an artist, a maker of gifts.
You may not get rich from working your own cut flower garden (well, you might if you try these 9 ideas), but you will be the richer for it.
(Don’t forget, check out the books above for more advice on the actual doing, or visit the Sarah Raven website by clicking the logo below for step by step guides…!)
Buxus the Norfolk Terrier In Modern Topiary Book
This is Buxus, our Norfolk Terrier, who I acknowledge in the acknowledgments of the book of Modern Topiary. The book of Modern Topiary can be read, for free, here. There you go. Buxus the dog on ‘doorstep duty’ at a friend’s house in Edinburgh. For those asking what he looked like!
What People Think Of Modern Topiary, The Book
Yesterday I put out the book – Modern Topiary – that I have spent the last six years writing. Download for free a pdf of Modern Topiary here. And what seems amazing to me, is that not only have people actually been reading it, but then responding to it. So below are a number of comments I have been sent from those who read it last night, and this morning…. “Brilliant read, exactly the right amount of info to take in and digest.” Rachel, a gardener “Just finished reading – absolutely brilliant!” Camilla (she shared with me lots she highlighted) …
Modern Topiary Book
Over the last six years I have been writing a book. It is called Modern Topiary and I have finally finished it, and now made it available for people to read. This is the blurb on the back…. This is the topiary book I wish I had when I began trying to clip plants into a shape others would consider beautiful. Split into two parts – the craft and then the art of topiary – I have tried to share everything I know. It’s not a long book. I hope this gives you the foundation for good technique, alongside ideas …