Glory of the garden

Flower farmer and florist Rachel Siegfried uses woody plants and perennials to bring colour to late-season arrangements, three of which she has made for COUNTRY LIFE

- Tiffany Daneff 

YEARS of growing a large range of flowers, grasses and shrubs at her flower farm in Oxfordshire, with observation of their habits and needs, has given the flower farmer and florist Rachel Siegfried a keen sense of the value of shrubs and perennials in flower arrangements—particularly late in the year when flowers for cutting are few and far between.

In The Cut Flower Source Book, she makes a strong case for woody plants and perennials forming a ‘permanent backbone’ to a cutting garden. If grown for cutting, trees and shrubs can be planted closer together than they would be normally. They can even be used to create a windbreak for more susceptible plants. Hardier and longer lived, they not only offer flowers in spring and summer, with berries later in the year, but the way their branches bend lends an easy naturalness to every vase, as can be seen in these three arrangements she has made for COUNTRY LIFE.

Her route to becoming a flower grower took in five years designing gardens for the NHS, followed by another six years working in a walled garden on a private Cotswold estate where, each Friday, she filled the rooms in the house with flowers. Inspired by Constance Spry, she used everything she could find in the productive garden, supplemented with wildflowers and grasses from the meadows and sprays cut from the hedgerows. Eventually, she moved to a two-acre market garden where she grubbed up the vegetable beds and prepared the ground to becoming a flower farmer and florist—thus was launched Green and Gorgeous.