A friendly guide to the simple and mindful practice of growing and enjoying cut flowers in every month of the year. Flowers have the power to heal, connect, and bring joy, often when we need it most. And more importantly, the best flowers are those grown with your own two hands. The Beginner's Cut Flower Garden is the perfect book for gardeners who are dipping a toe into growing cut flowers for the first time. Gardener and therapeutic horticulturalist Elizabeth Brown offers thoughtful, step-by-step, seasonally inspired narratives, information on the flowers to grow, and more, including: Focusing on your vision, color palette, and floral style Developing a cohesive garden plan, and installing garden beds Exploring floral design and creating arrangements with freshly cut flowers Inspiring floral art activities and natural dye projects, and more ... With the poetry of a classic horticultural guide and the accessibility of a contemporary garden club, Brown brings a collaborative, welcoming spirit to the process of growing flowers: we’re all beginners here. You, too, can grow flowers to enrich and bring brightness and balance to everyone's daily life! Read more
From the Publisher A Flower Is a Memory Consider, for a moment, some of your earliest memories of flowers. How do you feel when you call these memories to mind? How meaningful would it be if you could create a garden that pulled these warm, seemingly faraway places and people to the front of your mind every time you stepped out the back door? Creating a cutting garden that reflects where you have been, and perhaps where you want to be, allows one to move through the growing season with purpose. This garden of the mind’s eye will anchor you to the soil beneath your feet and the seed in the palm of your hand. Types of Flowers When we create a cut flower garden, it is important to cultivate blossoms with a variety of shapes, textures, and heights. This allows us to create bouquets and arrangements that are visually interesting. The four types I grow in my garden are called focal, secondary, and filler flowers, and foliage (or greenery). Focal Also known as mass flowers, these tend to be the visual lead actors of every bouquet. Your eyes are immediately drawn to these blooms’ lush and expansive nature. Think large decadent tulips, dahlias, and roses, or uniquely colored sunflowers. Secondary Often, this is a flower that has an interesting shape but is less flashy than a focal flower. It adds dimension or line to an arrangement. Foxgloves, delphiniums, and snapdragons are fine examples of line-shaped flowers that work well in a bouquet. Also consider smaller zinnias or cosmos as secondary flowers. Filler These blooms are just as they sound—something to soften the hard lines and fill the gaps between your focal and secondary flowers. Often they have multiple small blooms on a single stem. My favorites include yarrow, Queen Anne’s lace, feverfew, and flowering herbs. Foliage I only add foliage to bouquets or arrangements when I see greenery that shouts to me from across the garden. Wild raspberry branches, boxwood, and ornamental grasses are all beautiful in their own right. Personally, I dislike when foliage is used to fill in or overstuff a bouquet. Elizabeth Brown Elizabeth Brown is the founder of Foxglove Farmhouse, a cut flower garden from which she grows flowers for her community and educates others to do the same. She lives in Maine with her husband and two children. The Essential Guide to Bulbs: Grow a Bounty of Beautiful Bulbs in Gardens and... The Ultimate Flower Gardener's Guide: How to Combine Shape, Color, and Textur... The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: The Essential Guide to Planting and Pruning... My Garden: A Year of Design and Experimentation Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden: Innovative Techniques for Combining Bulb... Add to Cart Add to Cart Add to Cart Add to Cart Add to Cart Customer Reviews 40 77 730 13 22 Price $22 10 $29 99 $22 49 $20 23 $5 99 "Jenny Rose Carey presents bulbs in a manner that makes them both approachable and irresistible. A worthy addition to any garden library.” ―Brenna Estrada “From bloom shape to colour and more, this book gives you the knowledge to design your flower borders for maximum effect.” —The Garden, RHS “This practical guide is lush with clear, step-by-step advice.” —Real Simple “Dutch garden designer Van der Kloet invites readers along for a year-long visit in her lush garden. Month by month you'll see what's blooming, what problems she's encountering, and what plants she's been experimenting with.” ―The American Gardener “A must-have for any bulb gardener for planting tips, design ideas, and learning about specialty bulbs.” ―PureWow
