Flowers have the power to transform both our gardens and our homes, but creating a steady supply of beautiful blooms throughout the year takes more than simply planting whatever catches your eye. Few people understand that better than Sarah Raven, whose decades of growing, trialing and arranging flowers have inspired gardeners around the world to think differently about the cutting garden. Sarah joins me to share the practical techniques behind growing abundant, long-lasting cut flowers, along with the simple habits that can help gardeners of any skill level enjoy fresh bouquets from their own gardens for much of the year.
Sarah began growing flowers on her historic farm, Perch Hill in East Sussex, England. She has been called one of Britain’s greatest gardening voices. She is a Sunday Times bestselling author, a broadcaster, and the person who convinced a generation of gardeners that many of the best flowers that you enjoy in your own garden are some of the best options for enjoying in your home, too, as beautiful, long-lasting, hyper-locally grown cut flowers.
Sarah Raven harvesting from a cutting patch she made when creating an online course on growing cut flowers with Create Academy. It’s the end of June, a peak time for hardy annuals moving on to half-hardy annuals.
Credit: Jonathan Buckley
For 30 years, Sarah has been changing the way we think about our gardens — not just as something to look at and enjoy for the pollinators and ourselves, but also as a living, generous source of color, scent and beauty for every room in your house. And now, with her stunning new book, “A Year of Cut Flowers: A Life of Growing and Arranging for All Seasons,” she’s sharing almost everything she knows: the growing, the harvesting, the arranging, and the deep personal joy that comes from filling your home with flowers that you grew yourself.
Whether you have an acre or a window box, whether you’ve been gardening for decades or you’re just starting out, Sarah believes that you can have abundance all year round from your own patch of soil. This is a conversation packed with practical wisdom, beautiful ideas and more than a little inspiration.
Meet Sarah Raven
Sarah was brought up in the world of horticulture and, from an early age, loved to go “botanising” with her father, spotting wildflowers. Holidays were spent in Scotland and in the mountains of Italy, where Sarah, and her twin sister, Jane, were allowed to pick dandelion clocks (the fluffy white seed head stage of dandelions) on the hillside.
She happened to be on the west coast of Scotland during our conversation.
“ I was brought up partly here, and my dad was a botanist,” she says. “And so throughout the holiday time we would be off together, many days a week really, looking at wildflowers.”
Her dad retired early and got obsessed with the British National List of Flora.
“He had emphysema, and so increasingly found it difficult to walk very far,” she says. “And so I became his legs. He trained me to recognize different families and different plants and different species within the family. So from when I was maybe 8 years old, I suppose, I really got to have a kind of complete immersion therapy in Latin names and wildflowers.”
When she became a gardener later in life, it was like she was bilingual.
“ It’s sort of there,” she says. “You don’t have to think. It’s just instinctively there.”
Her immersion in botanical education continued into her teenage years.
Dahlia and gladioli trial beds with a couple of stellar grasses in the foreground,
Chasmanthium latifolium to the right and Panicum capillare ‘Sparkling Fountain’ to the left. Sarah and her team pick in good quantities in August and on through the autumn.
Credit: Jonathan Buckley
A Cut-and-Come-Again Realization
About 30 years ago, she published her first book, “The Cutting Garden.” She was a medical doctor at that time.
“ So my first child was born when I was 30, so I took maternity leave then, and just took a year off to be with the baby and to garden, and I loved cut flowers,” she recalls. “And so rather than sort of general gardening, I focused on just a little plot, which I divided into meter squares … planted and sowed different plants into each of these squares — 12 different plants.”
She says because she is quite a nerd, she measured how much she harvested from each square.
“ What I found is that one of my favorite plants for cutting, which is a peony, gave me nine stems In a whole season,” she says. “ And whereas a plant I’d never grown before, which was Cosmos Purity, I got 52 buckets of stems.”
She started researching and realized the difference was that only some plants are “cut-and-come-again” flowers, which is due to auxiliary bud formation.
“By taking out the leader, by picking a cut-and-come-again plant, you redistribute the growth hormone in the plant,” she explains.
Cutting the leader above a pair of leaves makes for a bushier, more productive plant.
“You actually perpetuate your harvest rather than deplete your harvest, and as soon as I realized the sort of science or the physiology that was sitting behind that different behavior in a way, the world was my oyster,” Sarah says.
While cutting flower production was going on in commercial glasshouse polytunnels, small-scale, home-spun, simple cut flower growing had completely gone out of fashion, apart from in the odd allotment or grand country house, she says.
The beautiful poppy, Papaver rhoeas ‘Amazing Grey,’ which lasts two to three days in a vase with stem ends seared.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
A Year of Cut Flowers
Sarah researches and trials flowers in the growing season and writes in the winter.
“A Year of Cut Flowers” is her 14th book, the fourth in a series of practical, inspirational garden books. She previously wrote about a year of growing in pots and a year of growing vegetables.
“ I want it to be non-intimidating for beginners,” she says.
January and February make up one chapter and November and December make up one chapter, because horticulturally they are very similar, she says. But then every other month of the year is its own chapter.
“The first part of the chapter is what I’m picking, how to arrange it … and the second part of the chapter is what I’m doing horticulturally in that moment to prepare for later in the year,” she says.
A classic Cashmere Jersey palette with the early Tulipa ‘Apricot Delight’ and scented Narcissus ‘Bell Song’, ‘Actaea’, ‘Pink Charm’ and ‘Beautiful Eyes’.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
Keys for Cut Flower Gardening Success
The No. 1 rule in beginning a cut flower garden is to start really, really small, Sarah says.
A 4-foot-by-12-foot garden can yield three to four bunches of flowers from June through the end of September.
“ Do you need more than three or four bunches of flowers?” Sarah wonders. “Most households don’t want more than that.”
And in that limited space, “ don’t cram it so full that the plants don’t have room to breathe.”
The flowers are all competing for the same air, water, nutrients and light. If they are packed into a garden, they will go to seed faster to try to outcompete the flowers they are sharing space with, and they will die quickly.
Her third piece of advice for beginners is to not think of their garden surface area as one. Think of it as two, or three or even four. That is to say, think of it as layers, with flowers of different heights and blooming times.
“ I do a lot of layering down into the ground with things that come up through each other,” she says. “ And so for instance, I grow a lot of narcissi, or daffodils, the highly scented multi-flowered long vase life variety, and they go in in the autumn. And I then will put dahlias over the top of them. And so then with narcissus I’ve got spring covered, and then with the dahlias I’ve got summer and autumn covered.”
A feather-duster-like vase of lupins ( ‘Terracotta’, ‘Beefeater’ and ‘Masterpiece’).
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
Live-Heading
Rather than dead-heading flowers, Sarah practices ‘live-heading” when it comes to cut-and-come-again plants. That means she cuts the stem just as the flower is showing color but before it fully opens. The habit transforms both stem production and vase life.
Never cut down to the ground. Always cut above a pair of leaves. That way, the growth hormone will hit the stump and send out axillary buds.
“As long as you cut in that way, you’ll massively, massively enhance production,” Sarah says.
When an annual gets to the three-leaf stage — after its seed leaves, and three pairs of true leaves have grown — pinching off the tip of the plant will stimulate axillary buds to grow just as the plant is at its steepest growth curve.
Really quickly — within 24 hours for a cosmos and within 36–48 hours for a zinnia — axillary buds will form.
With sunflowers, for instance, by pinching, you multiply by seven to eight times the number of stems you will pick from each individual plant.
“So when you multiply that by 30 plants, you make such a profound difference,” Sarah says.
A variety of nerines including ‘Favourite’, ‘Isabel’, ‘Ostara’, ‘Amandi’ and ‘Like a Virgin’ arranged together in a firework mix along with Nerine ‘Zeal Giant’ and Euonymus europaeus.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
Commercial Flowers vs. Untreated Flowers
Cut flowers grown on a large, commercial scale are often chemically treated so they last longer to be shipped long distances while remaining marketable.
Sarah did a decomposition trial comparing roses she bought and roses she grew. She found that supermarket flowers take much longer to biodegrade.
Sarah doesn’t treat flowers with bleach or other chemicals. She does add three tablespoons of clear vinegar to a liter vase of water to create a more acidic environment that decreases bacterial reproduction. She reapplies vinegar every three days.
“It’s the bacteria that chomp away at the end of the stem and form that slime, which then blocks the capillary uptake of the water, which then ages the flower, which then dies,” she explains.
The rose trial bed at dawn with Rosa ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in the foreground, which looks pinker than its usual purple when backlit. Here, scattered all through our rose picking beds, we have foxgloves and opium poppies (Digitalis purpurea ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ and Papaver somniferum), and you can’t see them here, but there’s an underplanting of salvias to keep the organically grown roses fungus-free.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
Container Growing
Sarah uses the compost that she makes on site for the majority of her potting mix. She fills containers up most of the way then uses bagged potting mix for the top 2 inches or so, so any weed seeds in her compost are covered and won’t germinate.
She mixes her compost, 50-50, with organic farmyard manure. It’s a very nutrient-rich substrate, which she has a lot of success with.
She also recommends an irrigation system on a computerized timer. Just 10 minutes in the morning is usually enough
Fertilizing Flowers
Overfed annual flowers will overproduce leaves rather than producing more flowers.
For an early May planting, expect 10 weeks of fertility from the compost the flowers were planted in. Then in the middle of July, Sarah applies a liquid seaweed fertilizer every other Friday.
“ And that will just keep them going a little bit longer,” she says. “So it’s not absolutely necessary, but it will just add you maybe three, four weeks at the end of the season.”
Cobaea scandens and Thunbergia alata ‘Sunny Susy Brownie’ cladding the arches down the central path in the Perennial Cutting Garden.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Buckley
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Sarah Raven on “A Year of Cut Flowers,” you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
Do you grow cut flowers? What are your secrets? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Episode 225: Growing Roses Sustainably
Episode 231: Vegetables Love Flowers (and Why You Should Grow More)
Episode 269: The Ultimate Guide to Flower Growing, With Jenny Rose Carey
Episode 274: Growing Cool-Season Annuals for Earlier Color and Hardier Plants
Episode 315: Succession Planting with Flowers
Episode 351: The Cut Flower Handbook, with Lisa Mason Ziegler
Episode 355: Growing Flowers, Seeds and a Business, with Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm
Episode 358: How a Volunteer Sunflower Turned a Flower Farmer into a Seed Breeder
Episode 431: Inspiration and Advice for Aspiring Flower Farmers
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Sarah Raven on Instagram | @sarahravenperchhill
“Grow, Cook, Eat Arrange” Podcast
“A Year of Cut Flowers: A Life of Growing and Arranging for All Seasons” by Sarah Raven
“A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers for All Seasons” by Sarah Raven
“A Year Full of Veg: A Harvest for All Seasons” by Sarah Raven
“The Cutting Garden: Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers” by Sarah Raven
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