Flower power!

Homegrown flowers are a great way to bring the outdoors in, and fill your home with colour and scent. Monty looks at what to grow and how to get the best blooms

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The best way to get an abundance of cut flowers, be it for a wedding or a bedside posy, is to grow them yourself. You can, as I often do, simply go outside into the garden and snip a handful of whatever is looking really good and bring that part of the garden indoors. This might be half a dozen little snowdrops or a great bunch of midsummer blooms, but inevitably it will be directed and inspired by two things. The first is what is looking good and catching your heart on that particular day and, critically, the second will be what the garden can spare.

This is the great problem with cutting great bunches of flowers. While it might make the house look much better, it often makes the garden look noticeably worse. You rob Peter to pay Paul. You could, of course, go out and buy cut flowers but they are alarmingly expensive and usually not nearly as nice as those from your garden. Because garden plants are much better scented, much more abundant, more varied and more idiosyncratic than their commercial equivalents, so the flower arrangements in your house will share all those qualities too.

Grow for cutting

The solution is to grow flowers specifically for cutting. You can do this in containers or a spare patch of ground, or make a virtue of it and have an area of the garden dedicated to growing cut flowers, which can look wonderful in its own right. At Longmeadow we have two new raised beds for cut flowers that we put in last year in front of the wooden greenhouse, and my friend Sarah Raven - the doyenne of cut-flower growing - created a large, magnificent garden at Perch Hill in East Sussex based around cut flowers.