| Excerpted from Annuals with Style An Annual Cutting Garden Tips on bed layout and plant selection Here are some useful ideas and tips for planning a cutting garden that allows you to enjoy your annuals indoors as well as out. This excerpt is from Michael Ruggerio and Tom Christopher’s Annuals with Style, now available in paperback.
A cutting garden will do best in a spot that is flat, well drained, and, most important, sunny. Most annuals perform best in full sun. You make heavy demands on cutting flowers, regularly removing whole stems with their leaves and flowers. To withstand this kind of continual drastic pruning takes a vigorous plant. And that plant depends on sunlight as its energy source. The best site is also one that is out of the way but not too remote. This planting is designed for productivity and is likely to look obtrusive if set down in the middle of your decorative beds. Besides, you'll want to mix flowers of diverse, even clashing, colors and forms in your cutting garden, so that you can assemble many different styles of floral arrangements and bouquets. You'll be planting the cutting garden in a practical rather than a pragmatic way, as well. The tallest flowers, for example, should be lined up on the north end of the garden so that they don't shade the other plants. One easy solution to this dilemma of convenient-but-not-too-obvious is to incorporate the cutting garden into an existing vegetable garden. If you want to give the cutting garden its own space, you can set it apart and reduce its visibility by surrounding it with fencing and draping that with annual vines. A curtain of sweet peas will hide the fencing and furnish armfuls of cut flowers itself. When selecting annuals to plant in the cutting garden, aim for a variety of flower forms. To make balanced-looking flower arrangements, you'll need some tall, spiked flowers such as snapdragons, some rounded blossoms such as marigolds or dahlias, and some airy, textural flowers such as annual baby's breath (Gypsophila elegans). Take care as well, to include both bold flowers such as sunflowers and some delicate ones such as rocket larkspur (Consolida ambigua). Draw attention to your arrangements by growing one or two striking novelties you'll never find at the florist, such as the chartreuse green zinnia 'Envy'. Because long, strong stems make flower arranging easier, choose "standard" or "tall" cultivars and avoid those labeled as "bedding" flowers, since this is a term typically applied to short-stemmed dwarf varieties. Try also to select plants that are horticulturally compatible. If you interplant cool-weather-loving snapdragons with heat-craving celosias, one of the two will be dissatisfied and bloom poorly. To harvest more flowers and do less staking of tall stems than in a traditional single-row layout, plant in wide rows. These are essentially narrow beds 18 in. to 36 in. wide, which, like the single rows, you run from north to south. Within each row, stagger the seedlings at the spacing recommended on the seed packet or plant label. Growing as part of a mass in this fashion, the flowers will hold each other up, and all the support you'll have to provide will be rows of brush stakes down the outsides of each wide row.
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