What are you growing?

So many kind people have asked me this question. I have experimented with lots of ways of answering it and it’s tough to find exactly the right description. I’ve tried “what aren’t I growing?”, which, aside from grammar issues, is a bit negative. Also negative are descriptions of all the things these flowers aren’t: see for instance, “not supermarket flowers”, “not imported”, and at the other end of the spectrum “not a wildflower meadow”. But I have been briefly at a loss for a more positive description: as a dedicated follower of many people who do (roughly) the same sort of thing (see, for example, many members of the trade association Flowers from the Farm, at https://www.flowersfromthefarm.co.uk/ ), I had kind of forgotten that there were other approaches to flowers available.

If you’re a keen gardener or flower buff, I’d love to tell you the long list of plants I’m growing - and I’m going to put some of that type of content at the end of this post. If you are just being nice (thanks!), or if you love flowers but don’t have a long list of scientific names in your brain, then here are some other things that reflect what I’m doing fairly well.

Firstly, I’m growing pretty much every annual flower that that I have heard of, that I like, that I can grow, that happened to work this year, that suits this climate and that works for floristry. I’ll hope to expand that list next year! Annuals are plants that complete their lifecycle within roughly a year. If they’ve flowered this year, they won’t be with you next year and you’ll have to re-sow them. Examples include cornflowers, cosmos and sunflowers (generally). I’m also growing as many perennial flowers as I can along the same criteria as above, but with the added constraint that many are bought rather than grown from seed, so it was really just as many as I could afford as a set-up cost, and there are therefore many that I will add next year. If you buy my flowers this year, that will allow me to invest in more different types for next year. Perennials generally come back year after year, so every time I plant a bed of them I tell myself repeatedly what an investment it is! Examples include gaura, sea holly and yarrow. Shrubs are great for foliage, but you can’t set one up in three months, so I have almost none this year. Your bouquet will be flower-heavy - I hope you don’t mind!

Some of the plants are wildflowers and some are native wildflowers - for example, cornflowers. Most of them, however, have been bred specifically for their form or colour, and some have been bred specifically for floristry, giving them long and strong stems. I pick out the varieties I think look the best. That’s why it’s not quite the same as a patch of wildflowers. Also, it’s a bit more organised - or will be!

For my second attempt, let me tell you what it looks like. Because these are all things that can be grown in the UK without too much fuss - no artificial light or heat - they are very definitely the sort of thing you’d find in a really nice British garden. But because I only pick what’s good on the day, it’s like a garden, but with all the best bits condensed into one armful of flowers. Something else that it has in common with a garden is that the flowers will behave in a range of different ways in the vase. Some will last for ages; some for a bit less time (you can whip these out and keep enjoying the rest); others, such as the gorgeous lavatera I have been harvesting recently, will continue to open over a number of days. The first flower may drop off, but another will open in its place. Some of them you can keep for years because they dry well (at the moment this include strawflowers and statice). This means a bunch of British flowers from me is just a bit more dynamic than something you might get from a supermarket where the stems are more likely to be imported, stored for a while, and a bit more static.

Now for the fun bit! Here’s a bouquet I put together for a friend who was passing through - everyone starts off by selling to friends, right? - earlier in July. I’ve labelled most of the ingredients to satisfy your curiosity if you really just wanted a list! Then for extra fun, and partly sparked by the recent British Flowers Week, I had a look through Wikipedia to check where everything came from - the ‘native to’ statement, anyway; it’s likely that breeding work for the specific varieties was done elsewhere. I loved this exercise, particularly noticing ones from the Americas (as most were more European), and fascinated by ones that can be pinned down to specific countries or even US states! I hope you enjoyed the surprise coda to this post. I look forward to thinking of a topic for the next one, when I get a break from weeding!