Best plants for a cutting garden

Free up some border space to create a beautiful cutting garden so you can pick vasefuls of beautiful flowers all summer long, says Anne Swithinbank

- Anne Swithinbank

SOMETIMES our gardens need a fresh direction to brighten them up and inspire new plantings. Starting a cutting garden won’t make a lot of hard work or cost the earth, as new plants can be grown from a few packets of seed. Now is a good time to target a sunny, sheltered bed or border that needs bringing back to life and make plans for a summer full of colourful and fragrant flowers alive with visiting bees, hoverflies and butterflies.

Choose cultivars of favourite hardy and half-hardy flowers like pot marigolds, ageratum and tobacco plants, seeking out those producing taller-thanaverage stems. Give each plant plenty of room to develop and by cutting flower stems regularly just above new growth to come, well-developed plants will react by producing more. Although these annuals will die away in autumn, you can plan for a completely different palette of plants and colours every year.

I gather snippets of flowers and foliage every month from our garden, and leave the main backbone of shrubs, herbaceous perennials and bulbs in place. Think of adding florists’ favourites like evergreen Pittosporum tenuifolium and Eucalyptus gunnii. Pruned hard in spring, this gum will deliver sprays of leaves to set off summer blooms.

Plan your border

Move unwanted plants from the new cutting border and condition soil by forking in well-rotted garden compost or other soil conditioner. Plan where the flowers will go and, when weed seeds begin to germinate this will be a sign that soil is warm enough to start sowing hardy annuals direct. From early spring, begin sowing half-hardy annuals into pots in warmth, bearing in mind you won’t need huge numbers of each kind.