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Perennial pickings – cut flowers from your garden

Whether it’s for length of blooming, resilience, sustainability or cash-saving credentials, perennial cut flowers have a lot to offer. Esther McMillan asks four experts to give their recommendations

When we think of cut flowers, we generally imagine colourful annuals. But with recent weather patterns making this harvest more unpredictable, many gardeners are finding that perennials offer a more dependable core to their cutting patches. While a cold May can delay your sweet pea flowers, it won’t upset your delphiniums to the same extent.

Having a selection of perennials to cut helps reduce the volume of annuals needed. You can also start picking perennials earlier in the year, mixing hellebores with early blossom and spring bulbs. For the cash-conscious, a packet of perennial seeds will give long-lasting dividends, while established clumps can be divided and exchanged.

There’s a great range to explore, and January is a good time to plan sowing first-year flowerers, such as scabious, under cover. Whether you have the space for a dedicated cutting patch or aim to graze your borders for picking flowers, these long-lasting blooms have much to offer.


The sustainable florist – Kate Hurst

Kate Hurst runs Worcestershire florist Camomile & Cornflowers, and is a founding member of Sustainable Church Flowers, set up to ‘glorify God sustainably’ using locally grown flowers and arranging without plastic-based floral foam.

Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’

The white form of red valerian is often seen growing in hedgerows
Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ has fluffy flowerheads on robust stems. Keep picking and it flowers from July to October. On my rich soil, stems reach 80cm, but it’s also drought tolerant. It adds an informal cottagey feel to arrangements, as well as softness from its silvery-green stems. For me it’s a better foaming filler for weddings than gypsophila, which smells offensive! Bees love it too. You can sow from early spring and it will flower in its first year.

Helleborus × hybridus

Plunge hellebore stems into water overnight for interesting cut flowers
Helleborus × hybridus The Double Ellen Series in particular, offers superb stem length. I grow it with snowdrops in my woodland patch and it reaches a flowering height of 60cm. They come in pinks, purples and whites, some spotted. Double hellebores have more impact in arrangements than singles, and white cultivars age to a lovely green. I start picking when seedpods begin to form in January, scoring vertically down the stems, then plunging them into water up to their necks overnight. They’ll last 4–5 days in a vase, and even longer once the seed pods become more bladder-like.

Origanum vulgare

A favourite for both chefs and bees, oregano is an easy-to-grow herb
Origanum vulgare (wild marjoram) seeds around my garden giving 70–80cm tall stems of pink fluffy blooms. It’s prolific from June to late August here, and grows on poor waste ground and on my clay soil. The herby scent is great in bouquets; I use it as a filler with roses, for cooking, and bees love it. Divide or sow it in early spring.


The flower farmer – Rebecca Aning-Brown

Rebecca and husband Antony own Silver Grey Foliage, an urban flower farm in West Yorkshire, where they grow 60,000 stems a year for the floristry market. She is the author of The Flower Farmer’s Planner.

Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’

This robust, scented catmint billows gloriously over paths with wafts of blue flowers all summer
Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ AGM has multiple uses. We pick the green foliage in late spring and the soft lilac spires in early summer, which we carry on cutting until autumn when the leaves are more silvery. By continually cutting stems (which can reach 60cm long), we don’t need to chop back mid-season as you’d usually do in a garden. It dries well, and bees love it.

Geum ‘Mai Tai’ (Cocktail Series)

This pretty geum is popular among designers and gardeners for its cheery blooms
Geum ‘Mai Tai’ (Cocktail Series) is valuable to me, despite its one season of use. In May to early June it gives an incredibly high yield of 50cm stems to mix with biennial crops like apricot foxgloves, sweet rocket and Iceland poppies. I harvest hundreds of stems from just 15 plants, so it’s well worth the space. Drought tolerant, it’s a must for me on our windy, sunny field. Florists love the peachy tints that blend with other flowers on the blush spectrum.

Scabiosa caucasica

Scabious will keep flowering right from summer into autumn if you cut them regularly
Scabiosa caucasica, in particular, ‘Fama Deep Blue’ gives sturdy but flexible 80–90cm flowering stems loved by florists for their strong meadowy presence. For the grower it repeat flowers from June to late September with multiple flowers per stem to cut. It’s easily grown from seed in August for planting out in spring or sown in January to flower in year one. After year three it’s still garden-worthy, but plants are less productive with shorter stems.


The prairie gardener – Pauline McBride

Pauline McBride and husband Paul began creating the 8-acre Sussex Prairie Garden in 2008. It’s now an RHS Partner Garden with beds of naturalistically planted perennials and grasses, which Pauline picks from as well as her designated cutting garden.

Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii

The classic coneflower is a ray of sunshine that has a long cutting season
Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii AGM is a classic prairie plant and an enthusiastic spreader, throwing up stems to around 1m in height. It’s very productive and keeps flowering generously from August to the first frosts, so is great for cutting over a long season. The uber golden flowers add a great zing and, as winter arrives, their deep brown button-like centres are still exciting in the garden. It does well in most soils in full sun or partial shade.

Panicum virgatum ‘Rehbraun’

Tawny switch grass, here seen at RHS Hyde Hall, on the left, is a useful filler
Panicum virgatum ‘Rehbraun’ is a superb switch grass with an upright habit to 1m. From August it bears pendent purple flower clusters, then seedheads, which stand into winter. As the leaves turn red it gives an extra element of wonder. I love to mix it with other late flowers in a vase. Planted en masse it makes dramatic swathes in the garden here. It’s happy on most soils, but full sun gives the best colour.

Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Thunder’

A favourite of plantsman Piet Oudolf, great burnet adds dark spots of interest in flower arrangements
Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Thunder’ is a Piet Oudolf selection I prize for its longevity of flowering. The claret-red flowers float at a height of 1.2m, like a swarm of bees above the border from June to September, and the airy branching habit gives height and movement in a vase. It prefers full sun, creating clumps 60cm across and thrives on most soils, including our heavy clay.


The nurserywoman – Laura Willgoss

Laura owns Wildegoose Nursery, alongside her husband Jack. It’s a specialist perennial, grass and viola nursery in Shropshire. Based in an historic walled garden near Ludlow, they’re cultivating a modern experimental garden.

Geum ‘Hilltop Beacon’

A peachy, graceful geum on 50cm airy stems
Geum ‘Hilltop Beacon’ has a shorter flowering window than more popular geums like ‘Totally Tangerine’. But I value this rarely-seen cultivar for its 4–6 weeks of glory from late May to June. Stems are tall, to 80cm, and bear nodding flowers of orange softened by apricot. We cut down stems after flowering, and every few years divide the plants at this time. Like many early summer flowering plants, we find they root down well from division in July.

Miscanthus sinensis

All miscanthus have beautiful flowerheads, which last well into late winter
Miscanthus sinensis. There are many types of Miscanthus but ‘Silver Sceptre’ is a prolific flowerer with us, so we pick it and there’s still plenty of seedheads left to stand in the garden through winter. This deciduous grass makes a lovely arching plant with flowering stems to 1.5m, and the fine foliage with a white midrib gives a soft effect. The pinky-silver flowers open in September then dry to frizzy, puffy plumes. Happiest in full sun, it will grow in a range of soils including clay.

Centaurea montana ‘Purple Heart’

This pretty little ferris-wheel shaped perennial will reward being picked with more flowers
Centaurea montana ‘Purple Heart’ flowers in late May and June at around 30cm. It stands well in a vase where its purple-centred flowers with long white florets draw your eye alongside acidgreen euphorbias, purple alliums and geums. Because we pick from garden borders, not a designated area, we plant it towards the back. After flowering we’ll cut it back and it’ll be screened by taller, later flowering plants. It tolerates a range of soils and prefers sun.

First published in The Garden Magazine, January 2024

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Helleborus × hybridus 'Double Ellen White Spotted' (d)
hellebore 'Double Ellen White Spotted'
  • 0.1–0.5 metres
  • 0.1–0.5 metres
<em>Helleborus</em> × <em>hybridus</em> 'Double Ellen White Spotted' (d)
Origanum vulgare
oregano
  • 0.5–1 metres
  • 0.5–1 metres
<em>Origanum</em> <em>vulgare</em>
Panicum virgatum 'Rehbraun'
switch grass 'Rehbraun'
  • 1.5–2.5 metres
  • 0.5–1 metres
<em>Panicum</em> <em>virgatum</em> 'Rehbraun'
Helleborus × hybridus 'Double Ellen White Spotted' (d)
hellebore 'Double Ellen White Spotted'
  • 0.1–0.5 metres
  • 0.1–0.5 metres
<em>Helleborus</em> × <em>hybridus</em> 'Double Ellen White Spotted' (d)
Origanum vulgare
oregano
  • 0.5–1 metres
  • 0.5–1 metres
<em>Origanum</em> <em>vulgare</em>
Panicum virgatum 'Rehbraun'
switch grass 'Rehbraun'
  • 1.5–2.5 metres
  • 0.5–1 metres
<em>Panicum</em> <em>virgatum</em> 'Rehbraun'
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