As a garden center with a florist, we have a unique opportunity to grow fresh flowers for our arrangements. Here’s how we’ve done it.
Here at Colonial, we don’t just run a garden center–we also have a talented florist! LeeAnn Borga has over 15 years of experience and designs beautiful arrangements for every day and special occasions. One of our goals over the last few years has been to supplement our fresh flower supply with those we grow on grounds.
Why is planting a cutting garden important for us? Sustainability and quality. There is no fresher flower than the one we harvest directly from our gardens. In 2023, we were able to fill summer orders and even supplement wedding flowers with ones that were cut at our location in Phoenixville. Planting these gardens also helps our efforts to cut our carbon emissions. Along with installing solar panels to power our energy use, we are actively looking for ways to cut carbon from our supply chain. Fresh flowers are typically imported from central and South America, which burns a lot of fossil fuels in transit. The only thing we burn when harvesting our flowers is calories as we walk out into the beds to cut some flowers for your bouquets and arrangements.
Our cut flower garden is a collaborative effort between our florist LeeAnn and our Plant Care Team. We wanted to share how we plan our cutting gardens so that you can plan your own!
Planning the Space:
The first thing to do is to plan ahead. Your growing space will help determine which flowers you can grow. This may be a dedicated cut flower bed, or it may mean incorporating cutting flowers into your established garden. You’re looking for a space with at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight for the best flower production from our favorite cut flowers with decent drainage.
For us, the bed along the front of our gardenhouses produced an amazing crop of zinnias last year so we planned on using it again along with space behind our houseplant house. There are also spaces at the store that don’t work for us! Our beds along the road get lots of sun, but the pressure from cars (wind, salt, air pollution) and repeated issues of powdery mildew limits the types of flowers that thrive there. Our gardens in the woods have a lot of spots for plants, but they must be deer resistant options since we have a large herd that makes its home there. Consider factors like these, as well as rabbit issues, poor drainage, and accessibility when planning your space. Amending the soil or adding fencing may turn a challenging space into an ideal one.
Selecting the Flowers:
Really, any flower can be cut and placed in a vase, but certain elements make some flowers best suited for arranging in a professional setting. The best cut flowers have long stems that are sturdy enough to support the flower head. The flower itself should be hardy enough to stand up to handling and have good longevity when placed in a vase. If you’re sensitive to smells, scent should also be taken into consideration. For example, baby’s breath, salvia, and allium all have distinctive smells that may limit your use for them.
With a full nursery, we have access to just about any flower we want and we use a mix of annuals, which often have long bloom times, and perennials, which come back year after year. Irises and daffodils, both very deer resistant, are reliable perennials for us. Other perennials we use include yarrow, dianthus, and liatris. LeeAnn loves zinnias for their stunning colors, large flower heads, and great production. Gomphrena are great filler flowers while celosia can add texture. This year we decided to experiment with taller varieties of marigolds and flossflower to see if they would be successful in our beds. When selecting your flowers, we recommend selecting varieties that grow at least 20” tall so that the stems are long enough for arranging.
There are plenty of other options! Stock and snapdragons sport beautiful columns of flowers, but prefer cooler conditions than we could provide them. Cosmos are great flowers with a meadow vibe, but their fragile stems make them less well suited for formal arrangements that we specialize in. Sunflowers are stunning, but for us, they don’t do as well in our beds and we can get them very easily from other sources. While we decided not to dedicate space to these varieties, you may find that they work for you! These can have their own dedicated bed, or be worked directly into your landscaping.
Care:
Let’s be clear–for us, these flowers aren’t free! They require purchasing the seeds or starts, planting them, and caring for them as they grow. The timing for us has always been difficult–the best time to plant these flowers is just after the risk of frost passes, but that’s the exact moment that our staff are the busiest unloading new shipments and helping customers find their perfect flowers. Jen, Pat, and Lindsay from our plant care team snuck in planting sessions on cloudy days. After the rush of prom season and Mother’s Day, LeeAnn left the floral studio and joined them in the beds to help weed.
We broke our planting into different parts to help make it more manageable for us. You can also break your planting sessions into phases so that your flowers mature at different times. This can extend your planting season and give you the option to rotate varieties during different times of year.
As these plants grow, we will keep an eye on them. Some may require thinning out if we see diseases that result from inadequate airflow. We may need to stake or otherwise support flowers growing on slopes. We did this for our zinnias and our lisianthus.
Another benefit of growing your own flowers: you’re in control of what chemicals are used for them. Our zinnias got an infestation of wooly aphids. Jen treated them with an organic horticultural oil.
Harvest:
Timing is everything when it comes to cutting flowers for arrangements. Some, like tulips, iris, peonies, and sunflowers, should be harvested prior to fully opening. Others, like zinnias and celosia, can be harvested after the flower is fully open. When harvesting, LeeAnn makes her way out to the gardens with a clean, sharp pair of clippers and a bucket of water. She cuts the flower a few inches from the base, giving herself a long stem to work with. She immediately places the flower in water to prevent wilting.
Before placing them in the vase, she inspects the flowers for pests and removes lower leaves, which will reduce the longevity of the flower and rot in the water. She makes a fresh cut before putting them into the arrangement.
Experiment:
The best gardeners are observant and learn from experience. Every year we make notes about what worked and what didn’t. We try different varieties of tried and true flowers and new techniques.
If you’ve visited Colonial Gardens, you already know that we’re a pretty unique place! It’s exciting to use our operations as an opportunity to combine our strengths to better serve our customers and improve our sustainability. It’s incredibly exciting to get a call for an arrangement and have LeeAnn take her clippers and bucket out to the gardens to harvest them.
We hope this blog has given you some inspiration for starting your own cutting garden. If you’d like to order a professionally designed flower arrangement, please visit our shop at shopcolonialgardenspa.com.
Colonial Gardens is an independent garden center serving the Phoenixville area since 1967. We have a full service florist, landscape design services, seasonal events, and one of the largest plant selections in the area.