Planning a cut flower patch from seed

Planning a Cut Flower Patch from Seed

You don't need a lot of space to create your own cut flower patch. With these tips, you'll be able to plan and organise your own cut flower bed, and start thinking about choosing what to grow in it.

I'm planning a cut flower patch grown entirely from seed. It's a vegetable bed that I'm devoting to cut flowers this year, so it will be 2.6m long by 2.4m wide. The flowers will be grown in rows and will all be annuals.

Grow flowers that bring you joy: choosing plants for a cut flower patch

• For cut flowers you want a good mixture of different flower types, including big flower heads (e.g. sunflowers) and smaller things for filler (e.g. phlox).
• Include a mixture of flower shapes and types:
• Bold flowers for focal points of arrangements – e.g. sunflowers
• Airy components and foliage plants to pad out arrangements – e.g. green tobacco flowers
• Laxer or trailing plants to spill over the edge – e.g. Phlox 'Crème Brûlée'.
• Think about what you'd like to bring into the house and have in your vase. What brings you joy?
• Think about the colours you want in your vase. Do you want bright colours? Muted tones? A bit of both?
• Think about scent too, so that you'll have fragrance in a bunch you pick – e.g. sweet peas and tobacco flowers are beautifully scented.
• Think about successional flowering and cut-and-come-again flowers that you can keep cutting over a long season.
• Don't forget some flowers can also be edible, so can be picked for a colourful addition to salads – e.g. nasturtium. See the RHS guide to edible flowers for a list.

How to plan your cut flower patch

1. Draw a scale plan of your cut flower bed on graph paper and draw in the rows.
2. Rows will need to be about a foot apart. In a border, you might plant further apart, but for cutting, you can plant them quite closely together as you want a dense flower patch to cut from.
3. Look at the seed packet to see how tall things will grow.
4. Start filling in the rows based on the factors below.

Things to consider when laying out your cut flower patch

• Put taller plants – e.g. sweet peas and sunflowers – in the back rows (north end) to avoid shading the shorter plants. Height should gradually step down as you go along the patch from north to south.
• Any support you might need for tall plants – e.g. hazel wigwams for sweet peas – if so, allow space for these.
• Number of plants per row – e.g. cosmos get very bushy so I only plant about five per row, zinnia six per row.
• Think how plants can support each other – e.g. Phlox 'Crème Brûlée' can be quite floppy so I'm weaving it through marigold 'Touch of Red Buff' in a row.
• You can maximise use of space by putting things that spill over at the front edge of the bed, e.g. nasturtiums.

Growing the plants

• When planning your sowing, think about which plants you might need to sow direct and which would be best sown in plugs or seed trays and planted out.
• I'll sow most of my cut flowers in seed trays undercover (in the greenhouse or inside), as this gives you more control.
• I grow these on into plug plants or potted plants that I then plant out.
• Some things need to be sown direct because they don't like disturbance, e.g. poppies, though these are a bit ephemeral for cutting.

> To see something develop when you've nurtured it from a seed, and see it grow and turn into this amazing flowering plant... There's nothing more satisfying and exciting

Your Assignment

1. Browse the Chiltern Seeds website and note down 8-10 flowers you'd like to try growing from seed. The categories below may be helpful:

• Flowers that are great for cutting
• Flowers with scent
• Flowers that are great for pollinators
• All annual flowers
• All first-year-flowering perennials

1. Check the height of each plant from its webpage description, and note these down. For example, the page for Scabious 'Black Knight' gives a height of 1.2m (4ft).

1. Following the considerations above, arrange your chosen plants into a design for a cut flower bed with 6-10 rows. You can choose the dimensions of your bed, but remember to allow around 30cm between rows, and think about the number of plants you might be able to fit into a row for each type.

Plant Directory

Ammi majus

False bishop's weed

Hardy annual

Apiaceae

Calendula officinalis 'Touch of Red Buff', 'Indian Prince'

Common marigold 'Touch of Red Buff', 'Indian Prince'

Hardy annual or biennial

Asteraceae

Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler'

Mexican aster, cosmea

Half-hardy annual

Asteraceae

Helianthemum annuum 'Ruby Eclipse'

Sunflower 'Ruby Eclipse'

Half-hardy annual

Asteraceae

Lathyrus odoratus cultivars

Sweet peas

Hardy annuals

Fabaceae

Nicotiana 'Lime Green'

Tobacco flower 'Lime Green'

Short-lived tender perennial, grown as half-hardy annual

Solanaceae

Panicum elegans 'Sprinkles'

Panic grass 'Sprinkles'

Half-hardy annual

Poaceae

Phlox drummondii 'Crème Brûlée'

Annual phlox 'Crème Brûlée'

Short-lived perennial grown as half-hardy annual

Polemoniaceae

Scabiosa atropurpurea 'Black Knight'

Scabious 'Black Knight'

Short-lived herbaceous perennial

Caprifoliaceae

Tropaeolum 'Ladybird Rose'

Nasturtium 'Ladybird Rose'

Tender perennial grown as half-hardy perennial

Tropaeolaceae

Zinnia MFG (Almost) Perfectly Pastel (mixed)

Common zinnia MFG (Almost) Perfectly Pastel (mixed)

Half-hardy annual

Asteraceae