Surrey Homes | SH42 | April 2018 | Garden supplement inside

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