Our “Growing Guides” offers detailed, step-by-step instructions on cultivating cut flowers from seed. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced gardener, these guides will help you select the right seeds, prepare your soil, and nurture your plants to full bloom. Discover tips on watering, fertilising, and pest control to ensure a thriving garden. Each guide is tailored to specific flower types, making it easy to grow beautiful, cutting-ready flowers for your home or garden.
Peonies are beloved for their beauty, scent and nostalgic charm — but with a short bloom window and years to establish, are they really worth the space in your garden? After 14 years of growing them, here’s my honest take on their magic, their limitations, and whether they belong in your cutting patch or simply in a spot you can visit each day.
This Nigella (Love-in-a-mist) mixture includes many shades of blue, rose, pink and white. While this plant looks quite fragile, it’s one of the hardiest early bloomers in the garden if autumn sown. Mine start alongside the tulips. Its brilliant green finely cut foliage and lacy, star-shaped flowers are framed by a delicate halo of fringed foliage. The flowers are splendid for cutting, and the attractive, inflated seed pods can be dried for winter decoration.
Snapdragon are a special treat with flower ruffles in ivory, cherry, pink, yellow, bronze, and peach flowers. The double petaled varieties are difficult for insects to pollinate, so their blooms last longer in the vase than other single-flowered types.
Calendulas are the fastest flowers to bloom from seeds, and easily self sow. Often called English marigolds, the plants are loved by beneficial insects. Petals can be used as fabric dye, are edible and are used medicinally as salves.
How to grow sweet peas. Sweet peas are a classic cottage garden and cutting flower and the scent of a handful can fill a room. Sweet Pea Spencer mix is a classic sweet pea mix of pinks, purples and whites and is particularly easy to grow.
The secret of how to grow Ranunculus. Discover the key to growing gorgeous Ranunculus every season with this secret method! Say goodbye to frustrating failures and hello to a thriving Ranunculus garden.
If you love the romantic froth of cow parsley in spring lanes of an English countryside then you will love the white umbells of the Ammi majus.
This is very easy to grow and takes over just as the cow parsley is finishing. It flowers for a long time if left unpicked. But if you can’t resist, it also makes a great cut flower.
How to grow Cerinthe Major. Cerinthe major forms a staple in flower arranging acting both as a filler or foliage. It has fleshy, blue-green leaves with drooping purple bell shaped flowers with yellow stamens. If they like their location they will easily self-seed and flower year after year.
How to grow cornflower. Cornflowers are a quintessential summer meadow flowers, also known as billy buttons or Centaurea cyanus. This cornflower mixture contains shades of pink, blue, mauve, violet and pure white, and is particularly fine for cutting.
How To Grow Ammi Visnaga (Queen Anne’s Lace). Similar to Ammi majus but flowers slightly later and with lovely feathery foliage and tightly packed, large flowers that start lime green and gradually open to greenish-white. The heads become more domed as the flowers open.