Garden #1: Cut Flower Garden with Annuals
I’ve always grown flowers for the value they add to our green landscape. I love the way a group of hostas can accentuate a curved raised garden bed or the way Irish moss softens the corners of a limestone path through the yard. I never considered growing flowers for harvesting until three years ago, when I grew interested in designing my own flower bouquets. It took a lot of practice to get comfortable with cutting flowers instead of leaving them on the stem for visual interest in the gardens. But designing my own bouquets brought me so much joy that I now have a dedicated cut flower garden nestled between two larger growing areas in my backyard.
We designed the cut flower garden (a rectangle raised bed measuring 12 feet by 4 feet ) for functional purposes and placed it in the sunniest part of the yard. Electing to go with a straightforward rectangular shape meant I could access flowers, even in the middle of the bed, with ease. In my first year of the cut flower garden, I arranged indoor-sown flower starts in rows running the width of the bed; each row was arranged by flower variety. When accounting for spacing, this allowed me to plant many flower varieties. I placed cosmos on the edge of the raised bed, but they grew so tall they shaded snapdragons growing beneath them. Now I grow tall flowers, including dahlias, along the back of the bed and I grow smaller varieties, such as snapdragons, near the front of the garden.
I try to plant flowers in orderly rows, but as time passes and flowers grow, the rows transform into organized clumps. I save a small corner of the garden for leftover flowers that won’t fit in any other area of my yard. In this watercolor sketch, you’ll notice one corner holds space for overflow zinnias, strawflowers, and gromphrena. Lavender grows as a border on two sides of the garden and is the only perennial plant growing in the garden bed.
Most of the cut flowers that I grow in this garden bed are ones you’d expect to find in a bouquet, such as zinnias, scabiosa, strawflower, snapdragons, cosmos, dahlias and gomphrena. But I love exploring the design potential of herbs, native plants and vines when building bouquets, too. The next three cut flower garden designs take an expanded look at how to create cut flower gardens using less traditional plants.
Garden #2: Herb Cut Flower Garden
If you’ve seen any flower bouquets I’ve made in the last two years, you’ll know that I find great joy in designing arrangements using herbs as a filler. Not only do herbs provide significant coverage in arrangements, but they also add complex scents that can amplify both the color and fragrance of other flowers in the design. One of my favorite herbs to harvest for design projects is oregano. It’s hardy, fragrant and easily pairs with annuals like zinnias and cosmos. Herb flowers also make a stunning bouquet all on their own. My go-to herb to arrange as a single bouquet is dill because its flowers, yellow and delicate, pop when placed in rustic containers with gray tones or in an all white bud vase. Those blossoms smell like quintessential summer to me.
Currently, I grow herbs across several raised garden beds, but if I were to design a standalone herb cut flower garden, it might look like this:
Again, organizing an herb cut flower garden with intentional paths cut through the space provides access to flowers while also creating an aesthetically robust layout for maintaining plants. A mixture of both perennial and annual herbs ensures a constant stream of flowers (and scents!) from May to October. Annual herbs included in this design: lemon Thai basil, Thai basil, cardinal basil and sweet basil. Perennial herbs included in this design: borage, feverfew, oregano, lemon balm, dill, lavender and mint. Many perennial herbs spread vigorously over time, but both mint and borage grow especially forcefully if not tended properly. I don’t mind cutting back or removing rogue borage and mint plants, but some gardeners may find this a tedious garden chore.
Garden #3: Woodland Cut Flower Garden
Once the traditional cut flower bed was established and I gained confidence arranging flowers instead of keeping them permanently in the landscape, I turned my attention to a low strip of the backyard that sits adjacent to a cedar fence beneath two shady trees. This area remained untouched over the years and often acted as a catch-all for yard-related equipment, like firewood or the wheelbarrow. Around the time I decided to add a cut flower garden raised bed, I also opted to transform this unused area into a woodland garden as a way to extend the patch of nearby hostas and to create a focal point that draws the eye across our yard. The area does not have great soil and gets over six hours of shade, so selecting plants to grow in the woodland garden needed to be intentional. Fortunately, we added gray landscape rock years ago from a different project and it now functions as a slim walking path along the fence, giving us access to the furthest portion of our yard.
The garden is only two years old, but I have already harvested flowers from this area that add depth and value to bouquets. When I am looking for delicate or airy blossoms I turn to the woodland garden because these plants create small blooms that pair well with showy flowers. This past spring I arranged a colorful triptych of three white bud vases filled with bright purple ajuga blossoms. What a treat it was to display these flowers indoors when the yard still held muted brown and gray tones.
Unlike cut-and-come annuals, such as zinnias, perennials growing in the woodland garden do not regenerate throughout the summer. When I harvest blossoms, I have a clear design purpose in mind. To offset the lack of blossoms in late summer, I elevate indoor houseplants, such as pothos, on thick wooden discs throughout the area, where they receive dappled light throughout the day. Incorporating houseplants and vining flowers adds an unexpected visual complexity to flower arrangements. I also love giving houseplants a good trim and then putting cuttings to good use in a bouquet!
Flowers in the woodland garden currently include spring blossoms such as lily of the valley, Virginia bluebells, hellebore and forget-me-nots, as well as flowers that bloom midsummer, like astilbe and a variety of hostas. I planted chocolate ajuga as a groundcover in select locations throughout the shady area.
Garden #4: Blended (Native & Non-Native) Cut Flower Garden
Recently, I transformed an existing garden bed full of perennial cultivars into a blended mix of flowers for both cutting and for landscape design. I’ve accumulated several perennial plants that anchor the growing area by adding distinct height or deep color to the space, such as assorted Asian lilies, monarda, columbine, Montana coneflower and yarrow. For years, I kept the flowers in the garden, choosing to enjoy their beauty while sitting on the patio. But one day I decided to add a pale peach cluster of lilies to a bouquet that needed more pizazz, and suddenly I looked at the garden bed in a whole new way. What once was a landscape-only flower bed became an opportunity for cut flower cultivation too.
Another distinguishing feature of this garden bed includes two large potted containers, which both include flowers I use in bouquets. On one end of the garden, I placed a vibrant star jasmine plant; the plant stays indoors during the winter but thrives outdoors in summer months. The curly tendrils are fun (and fragrant) to design with, especially if I’m trying to create a sense of width in an arrangement. On the other side of the garden sits a twenty-inch oversized terracotta pot filled with assorted annuals, such as canna lilies, sweet potato vine and petunias. I added indoor-sown celosia starts to the container, too, because I ran out of room to plant them in any of the other garden beds. In order to keep the celosia from visually overpowering the canna lilies, I routinely harvest blossoms and add them to bud vases or layer them into larger flower arrangements.
I grow assorted allium (including globe allium), liatris, monarda and creeping phlox in this garden, but they function as pollinator magnets and garden filler throughout the summer—I usually do not harvest these blossoms.
Betsy Maloney Leaf is an educator, writer, artist and gardener based in the Twin Cities. She’s the creator behind Roots & Vines on Instagram and Substack, where she shares short-form observational writing about gardening and original photography. Her gardening interests include growing flowers and a small kitchen garden, and she’s always trying to find ways to incorporate fresh herbs into floral bouquets.
