Surrey Homes | SH42 | April 2018 | Garden supplement inside
The lifestyle magazine for Surrey - Inspirational Interiors, Fabulous Fashion, Delicious Dishes
The lifestyle magazine for Surrey - Inspirational Interiors, Fabulous Fashion, Delicious Dishes
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SH <strong>Garden</strong> Supplement<br />
In full bloom<br />
Jennifer<br />
Stuart-Smith of<br />
Blooming Green shares her<br />
expert knowledge on how<br />
to start your own cutting<br />
garden and fill your house<br />
with flowers<br />
Nothing gives a house a lift like<br />
vases of fresh flowers – there’s<br />
a reason interiors stylists<br />
always arrive at shoots with armloads<br />
of them – but until quite recently<br />
most people only had cut flowers as an<br />
occasional treat on special occasions,<br />
or if in the summer months, they had<br />
a garden from which they could snip a<br />
few blooms without spoiling the display.<br />
Dedicated cutting gardens for a<br />
constant source of fresh flowers were<br />
mostly the preserve of stately homes,<br />
with walled gardens, a team of gardeners<br />
to tend the banks of peonies and<br />
housekeepers to trim and arrange them.<br />
Things have changed now that<br />
supermarkets stock banks of very cheap<br />
cut flowers – but the almost painfully<br />
bright colours of them and how<br />
unnaturally long they last gives a hint<br />
of how they are produced and gradually,<br />
people have become more aware of<br />
where their flowers come from.<br />
With that understanding, rather<br />
like the organic produce and veg<br />
box schemes, people are now more<br />
appreciative of seasonality, variety and,<br />
in the case of flowers, scent. People<br />
drive miles to pick their own flowers<br />
at our cutting gardens in Kent and our<br />
wedding customers in particular, go<br />
wild for the ‘just picked’ wild-flower<br />
look.<br />
The idea for setting up our business<br />
came about well over a decade ago,<br />
when I was working on a newspaper<br />
and kept on seeing articles about the<br />
unpleasant side of the global floristry<br />
industry; poor working conditions, the<br />
use of unpleasant chemicals and masses<br />
of plastic packaging.<br />
My cousin Rebekah,<br />
who has a background in<br />
environmental biology<br />
and horticulture, was<br />
considering new avenues<br />
alongside raising a family,<br />
so together we hatched the<br />
idea of setting up an ecofriendly<br />
‘green’ floristry business.<br />
Our flowers are grown on two sites,<br />
in the countryside south of Maidstone,<br />
on what were once orchards. We grow<br />
at least 500 varieties of flowers and<br />
foliage, so that we have something<br />
to suit every taste, from <strong>April</strong> right<br />
through to October, and we cultivate<br />
“You don’t have<br />
to have a large<br />
garden to grow<br />
your own cutting<br />
flowers ”<br />
them using an organic ‘no-dig’ method<br />
that improves productivity, soil health<br />
and saves our backs too.<br />
But you don’t have to have a field, or<br />
even a large garden to grow your own<br />
cutting flowers. By planning ahead,<br />
choosing your plants carefully and using<br />
every bit of available space you can have<br />
a steady supply of blooms for the house,<br />
or for friends, in spring, summer and<br />
autumn.<br />
And once you get into having – truly<br />
– fresh flowers and foliage<br />
in your home, it can<br />
be hard to live without<br />
them, and even in winter<br />
you can find interesting<br />
things in the hedgerow<br />
or cut stems of winterflowering<br />
shrubs such as<br />
forsythia.<br />
When it comes to deciding where<br />
to plant your cutting flowers, there are<br />
many options. You don’t even need a<br />
dedicated cutting patch – simply dot<br />
plants in your herbaceous borders, plant<br />
them amongst your vegetables, potagerstyle,<br />
or grow some in containers<br />
outside the back door.<br />
surrey-homes.co.uk<br />
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