A cut above

Nothing beats homegrown flowers for beauty, variety and scent. Tiffany Daneff asks three British growers for the best advice on starting your own cutting garden

- Tiffany Daneff

Georgie’s Garden Flowers, Culmington, Shropshire 

The idea of setting up a flower-growing business from home struck Georgie Fordham when she was sitting on a beach in Cornwall in the summer of 2020. It occurred to her how hard it was to buy nice flowers locally, as opposed to imported gerberas and scentless roses. ‘I loved the idea of British-grown, seasonally available flowers, so, when I got back home, then Wappenham in Northamptonshire, I put in an order for loads of tulip and narcissus bulbs and planted them in the garden, to supplement the herbaceous perennials in the borders.

That winter, she took a two-week intensive floristry course with Judith Blacklock in Knightsbridge, followed by a six-week online course with the inspirational American florist-grower Erin Benzakein, at Florets Farm in Washington, US.

Mrs Fordham sold her first bunches in February 2021. ‘I emailed the husbands and boyfriends of friends to see if they’d like to order Valentine’s flowers and ended up with 28 orders, which I hand delivered within a 25- mile radius of our home, as well as in London.’

Our raison d’etre is to embrace the ephemeral beauty of British flowers

As new requests came in, she needed more flowers than she could grow and as a result, in the spring of 2021, she contacted Flower and Farmer in the nearby village of Guilsborough. ‘Instead of flowers that have come from overseas and all look the same, theirs are fresh and individual, every bloom looks different.’ Then she discovered Anna Brown, who was growing flowers in a field not far away in Oxfordshire.