Designing your cut flower bed: Planning the patch for season one

Designing Your Cut Flower Bed: Planning the Patch for Season One

After drawing the plot onto tracing paper, I need to consider the paths and how to ensure I can reach all of the flowers.

The simplest way to do this is to measure the length of your arm. If you are able to have paths on either side of your bed, then the bed can be the width of double your arm length. If you are only able to have one path, then the bed can be as wide as just one of your arms.

Putting a stepping stone within your bed is also a great idea if you really want to maximise your space, as it extends your reach into the bed and means you can have more planting space and less path.

The five seasons are:

Season One - mid-March to mid-May

Season Two - mid-May to mid-July

Season Three - mid-July to mid-September

Season Four - mid-September to mid-November

Season Five - November to April

Planting in Season One

In season one, growing a good balance of flowers and foliage is what you're aiming for. Generally, I grow a third each of hardy annuals, biennials and bulbs.

The Benefit of Planning

By plotting and planning ahead of time, you'll find that the whole year will be much easier to manage. Planning ahead will provide you with a sowing and planting plan and give you a step-by-step action plan for each month. This will help you to visualise your garden and how it will be structured.

In the past, cut flowers were usually grown in rows to make them easier to pick and weed around. Through a process of trial and error though, we discovered that we can make more efficient use of our beds by layering plants.

In practice, this means planting out taller plants, with smaller squatter plants beneath them. Not only will this make your beds more beautiful, it will also provide inspiration when you are picking your blooms. You will be able to see different colours, shapes, scents and textures next to each other and therefore imagine them in your arrangement.

Perennial and Successional Tulips

At Perch Hill we've done a lot of experimentation to try and figure out the best way to make tulips truly perennial. Planting new tulips every single year can quickly become very expensive and is also much more labour intensive.

One of the main mistakes that flower farmers make when they are picking tulips is that they pull the stem out of the bulb, which then damages the bulb, meaning it won't flower the following year.

To conserve our bulbs we plant them at a depth of about six inches, on top of a layer of grit. By planting them at this depth, the tulips won't reproduce in the same way that bulbs closer to the surface will.

The energy required to produce bulblets means that the mother tulip generally stops producing flowers (goes blind) and therefore won't flower again the following year.

Keeping the bulb cooler at a deeper depth ensures that it won't produce bulblets and therefore will hopefully keep flowering for several years.

Another trick is to plant your tulips into quite stony ground and to treat them quite badly compared to how you would treat your vegetable plants for example. Holding back on the feed will also help to keep your tulips perennial too.

Planting Our Bulbs

To plant our bulbs at the required depth, we use a bulb planter on a stick, so we can remove a core of soil and put in some grit, before following this up with the bulb.

The perennial tulips we have planted are:

Tulip 'Spring Green'

Tulip 'Greenland'

Tulip 'Artist'

The succession tulips we have planted are:

Tulip 'Atilla's Graffiti'

Tulip 'Palmyra'

Tulip 'Menton'

Tulip 'Green King'

All of these varieties have a green flash on the outside of the flowers, and during our trials this seems to indicate that these bulbs will be good perennials. By picking varieties that will flower in succession, you will have blooms to pick for between eight and 10 weeks.

The other bulbs we planted are:

Narcissus Xit

Muscari

Our season one plants are:

Tulips

Polyanthus 'Stella Champagne'

Wallflower 'Vulcan'

Euphorbia oblongata

These plants are in the ground but will not flower until the following seasons:

Ammi majus

Ammi visnaga

Cerinthe

Dianthus 'Green Trick'