Cut Flower Gardening For Beautiful Bouquets
Terry Lowery

Imagine a never-ending supply of beautiful flowers for your
home, bouquets and arrangements to give to friends, flowers to
pluck at will for gifts, get-well visits, anniversaries and
birthdays. By planting a garden stocked with flowers that
happily give up their blooms for your pleasure, you can have
fresh flower arrangements in every room in your home all
throughout the spring and summer.

To create your own bouquet garden, start with a sunny spot in
your yard. A garden spot that gets 6 to 8 hours of direct sun a
day is ideal. It should be within easy reach for watering, since
a cut flower garden will need daily watering during any dry
spells. You’ll also want to design it to make it easy for you
to reach all the flowers in it, so a raised bed that can be
approached on four sides is perfect. If you decide to plant
against a fence or as a border, make sure that you can get to
all the plants without stepping on others by putting in
footpaths or trenches for walking.

The best way to start your cut flower garden is with bulbs
planted in the autumn. Daffodils and tulips are among the most
popular spring bouquet flowers. By getting them in the ground
in the autumn, you’ll be able to start cutting early in the
spring.

Some more unusual spring-flowering bulbs that make gorgeous cut
flowers include:

Giant flowering onion – Grows 3-4 feet tall, with huge purple
blooms. Great as a back border in a cut flower garden. Blossoms
from mid-spring through early summer

Windflower – also known as anemone, with daisy like deep pink
and white flowers, booms through midsummer

Crocus – blooms in early spring, though there are varieties
that bloom through autumn

Hyacinth – Tall clusters of blossoms that are stunning in
arrangements. Pink, blue, purple and white, they grow up to 12
inches tall. Bloom in early to mid-summer from fall planting.

Grape Hyacinth- Purple flowers that bloom in autumn and remain
green throughout the winter—although it’s dormant in the
summer.

Early in the spring, you can start planting gladiolus. These
huge, showy blooms are a mainstay of cut flower arrangements,
and come in just about every color imaginable. Gladiolus bulbs
can be planted as early as two weeks before the last frost. If
you plant a new set of gladiolus every two weeks, you’ll have
cut flowers from early summer all the way through the first
frost.

Roses are an entire subject of their own, but they deserve
special mention when discussing cut flower gardens. Rambling
and climbing varieties of roses are especially suited to cut
flower gardens, putting out masses of blooms and responding to
cutting with even more flowers. Trail a rambling rose along a
wooden fence rail and you’ll have sweet-smelling roses for your
bedroom dresser all summer long.

Also in early spring, you can plant your annuals. Snapdragons,
cosmos and zinnias all bloom at different times during the
summer, which will extend your ‘bouquet season’ into the fall.

Don’t forget to include ‘filler’ flowers in your cut flower
garden. Foliage grasses and flowers like alyssum, baby’s
breath, and Queen Anne’s Lace can fill spaces in your bouquets
and add a lacy, delicate touch to a vase full of flowers.

About The Author: This article courtesy of
http://www.about-flowers.com


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