Perennials as Cut Flowers from Your Garden (2024)

Why Cut Flowers?

Every garden should contain flowers that perform exceptionally as a garden plant and provide indoor pleasure as a cut flower. With a bit of extra care, many flowers can retain their stunning color and texture indoors, adding a taste of the garden to any room. Without question, the primary cut flowers are annuals, such as sunflowers, zinnias, and dianthus, but by adding seasonal perennials, your home-grown flower arrangements take on a new dimension: a flower masterpiece.

Using Perennials

Perennials are flowering machines that come back each year, producing a dazzling display of color for weeks or months. And that's not all! Many of these plants are low maintenance and durable, requiring little care once they're established in the garden. Regarding blooms, a single plant is usually covered with flowers, making the harvest process quick and easy. You can harvest the blooms without damaging the health of the plants, making them a renewable source for colorful bouquets each year.

Perennials also supplement your home flower arrangement in a seasonal nature because they bloom at various times throughout the gardening season. Create a spring display with early blooming dianthus and a warm summer display with echinacea and rudbeckia. As fall sets in, use the late-season blooms of aster to bring color into the home. And in winter, the dried blooms of allium bring a unique texture, especially when combined with other dried flowers.

Designing with Cut Flowers

Cut flowers are typically displayed in a vase, making it easy to transport them to any indoor space. As you design the arrangement, consider colors that go well together, such as purple and white or yellow and orange. Then consider texture, as some blooms have a unique shape that creates a striking accent. And remember foliage, which can also compliment the blooms. Perennial flowers have a very long vase life, often lasting a week or more. They offer tremendous ranges of color from the softest white (Shasta daisy) to the most rich, deep red of echinacea (coneflower).

We all have our favorites, and for us, one of them is the delphinium. Delphiniums bring stature and elegance to any flower arrangement because of their striking clear colors and upright habit. Filler flowers can be added in and around the delphiniums for an outstanding effect in vases.

Cutting Gardens

A growing trend among gardeners is to create cutting gardens designed to maximize cut flower production. These spaces include a variety of low-maintenance perennials that bloom from spring to fall to provide blooms all season. Some gardeners will create a grid system to maximize the number of flowers. In contrast, others incorporate more cutting flowers into their existing landscape. Flowers with long stems are typically grown for cut flowers since they fit into a vase. It's best to include blooms that come in various sizes and colors, giving you many options. Larger blooms are the perfect accent, while smaller blooms can be used to fill in the rest of the vase. With a cutting garden, you can bring the outdoor blooms inside to brighten your home anytime.

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