Grow your own cut-flower garden

Bring a blaze of colour and joy to your garden and home, most months of the year, by nurturing your very own flower patch. Cut-flower queen Sarah Raven shows you how

- Words: Sarah Raven

1 Colour therapy

I’ve been growing cut flowers since 1994 when I moved with my family from a small London garden to an East Sussex farm. I started with a 6x6-metre patch and now grow half a hectare – learning year by year which are the best plants and flowers to grow for the vase. Choose the right varieties and your garden and house can be full of flowers, teeming with colour, scent and abundance – the greatest form of gardening as life enhancer.

2 An experiment with planting

My first cutting patch was divided into 1.5-metre squares. In each I planted one thing. I bought 'Duchesse de Nemours' peonies; helenium ('Moorheim Beauty'); a couple of euphorbias (E. palustris for spring acid-green and E. sikkimensis for summer); some sea hollies and a swathe of Phlox paniculata hybrids. I sowed five cut-and-come-again annuals (such as cosmos) too. I then noted what I was harvesting, once or twice a week. The perennials were disappointing, yet the annuals pumped out flowers to pick at least twice, often three times a week. Out went plans for swathes of perennials, in goes almost any annual and dahlia I can get hold of. And that's been my direction for the last 30 years.

3 The right location

The ideal cut-flower patch is 1.2 metres wide and 3.5 metres long in a sheltered place and in the sun (even stealing a bit of the lawn which is often right in the sunny, middle of a garden). At this size, you can easily pick from around the edge and will be able to reach the flowers even bang in the middle. I promise, picked once or twice a week, this part of the garden will be your pride and joy, so don't hide it away like you might a vegetable patch.