Cut Flower Garden Update!

Spring finally arrived and I was able to make my cutting garden dreams a reality. As promised, I am back with some updates on how the project turned out, the changes that were made and how it’s going.

I planned and posted about this project in February/March when there was still snow on the ground and it felt like the weather would never warm up. As a refresher, or incase you are a first time reader, the plan was to create a cut flower garden to have fresh bouquets all spring and summer. We had a bush to remove and raised beds to build.

This is how the area looked before.

Right away this project started to be different than I expected and I had to make some adjustments. The area for the garden was much larger than I thought, more than double , and my little project quickly got a lot larger. Below was my overall, scaled plan for where the flower garden would be.

We started by removing the bush and building the garden beds. My husband built them out of cedar. We are also moved the gutter drain so that it faces toward the front of our house and interferes less with the plants.

This is how the area looked after the bush was removed and the beds were built and filled. We still need to dig up the roots from the bush but the areas is a lot more open and we have much easier access to the gate now.

My husband did a great job with building the beds. The cedar is a beautiful accent that we have used in a few placed throughout our house.

Some of my goals with creating this garden were:

• For it to be low maintenance, using mostly perennial plants and hardy bulbs.

• To place plants in a way that creates visual interest and so that all plants can be seen.

• Include some taller plants to provide some light privacy in front of the windows.

• Include plants that bloom at different times of the year so that the garden looks great throughout the growing season.

• Include some flowering bushes and climbing plants to help fill in the space.

• Lots of color and different shapes.

• Source as many plants locally as possible.

This was my detailed plan of where plants would go. I drew this to scale to try to help determine the amount of plants to buy.

The plan for planting was straight rows of plants, with the tallest plants in the middle and stepping down to the shortest plants around the outside edge of the beds. I envisioned alternating Peony and Rose bushes at the back, along the house. Foxgloves and possibly dahlias in front of the roses and peonies, with Baby’s Breath (or an alternative) at each end. Poppies and Alliums in front of the Foxgloves. Shasta Daisies in front of Alliums, and Tulips in front of the daisies. Daffodils on three sides along the edge and Bluebells at each end, behind the Daffodils. I planned to interplant some succession perennials with the bulbs in order to get blooms all season.

My plant list included:

• Rose Bushes

• Shasta Daisies

• Peony Bushes

• Allium

• Baby’s Breath, or something similar

• Poppies

• Foxglove

• Bluebells

• Daffodils

• Tulips

• Possibly Dahlia bulbs

• Groundcover Dogwood

• Purple Passion Flower for use as a climber on the fence.

• Climbing Hydrangeas to use on a trellis around the window

We started tackling this garden in late March and I had it fully planted by the end of May. I was able to find all of the plants on my list locally except for the Dogwood ground cover.

The garden has already gone through changes from when I started planting, which has been interesting to watch.

This is how the garden looked in April. I was still looking for rosebushes and a few other plants, but it was close to being complete.

I found some tulips that were already growing, but not bloomed yet, so I was able to get them planted in time to enjoy. They are gone now and have been replaced by Columbine. Hopefully, they will come back up next year. I also planted some Daffodil bulbs that should come up next spring.

The peony bushes are added in the back in this picture, with spaces in between for rose bushes. The foxgloves were just starting to grow and bloom. I planted poppies in three different colors, but they were not blooming yet in April. The Shasta daisies are also planted in this picture, but they are still small. The plants that kind of look like grass are the allium, that also did not have blooms yet.

Intermixed with the daffodil bulbs, around the edges I planted avens geum and tickseed coreopsis to give the same yellow color throughout the season. I was not able to find bluebells, but I substituted delphinium in the same deep blue color. I also added some multicolored bellis. I love how they look like little buttons.

This is the garden in mid - May. The alliums were blooming and everything was getting bigger. I had planted rose bushes and the remaining few plants I was looking for.

I planted two kinds of roses. One variety is bushes that were already growing and blooming. They have a creamy/ peach flower. These bushes took awhile to adjust and were not very happy for a few weeks. They are starting to look a lot healthier now.

The other rose bushes were bare roots. They are starting to sprout now, but will not have any flowers this year. They should be white in the center with red on the edges as shown in this picture.

The final plants added were baby breath bushes that I found in the sweetest shade of pink.

This is how the garden looks today. I did end up planting some dahlia bulbs that are getting huge, but have not bloomed yet.

The daisies are going to bloom any day now.

My final addition to the garden was this vintage, ceramic inch worm. I am still trying to come up with a name for him…

There are still a couple of things left to finish up this project. I need to find and plant the purple passion climbing flowers (or something similar) on the fence. We also still plan to build the trellis around the window but are planning to get our house painted this fall. We will build the trellis and plant the climbing hydrangea next spring.

I am so happy with how this project turned out! All of the plants are growing so well and I cannot wait to see how it develops over the years. Each plant should keep getting stronger and bigger each year and it should be pretty maintenance free. The ground cover will slowly spread and keep weeds out as well. I left some flexibility to change out a few seasonal bulbs each year, if I want to.

Our neighbors have given nice compliments on this garden and I wouldn’t make any changes to it.

Thank you for following along!

Update, July 2, 2022:

This is the first bouquet I got from the cutting garden. During this first growing season, I have not cut many of the flowers so that the plants can get strong and come back bigger next year but there are plenty of daisies. I love this sweet, cheerful arrangement!