Flower Power

Would you like gorgeous fresh cut flowers all summer? All you need is a handful of seed, a spare patch of soil, and five minutes a day.

- Louise Tickle

Just plant five of each,” was the stern advice from Georgie Newbery, artisan British flower grower and florist extraordinaire, “or you’ll be wading through forests of cosmos.”

Of course, she knew perfectly well that newbie gardeners can’t bear to sow only a few seeds, when packets of seeds promise an abundance of jewel colours. Sure enough, despite the notes I wrote on her cutting-patch course, 10 months later I could barely find my way through swathes of crimson and hot pink cosmos, some as high as my head.

Growing my own flowers was an idea that started in a supermarket, three summers ago. Gazing at the flower buckets by the entrance, I felt torn. Flowers make me happy – but if I wanted one mixed bouquet a week on the kitchen table, I’d be shelling out £40 a month. Looking more closely at the flowers, I wasn’t that impressed, either – the lilies had been flown in from Africa, the stocks were squashed in their plastic wrapping and the roses looked almost industrial in their uniformity.

So I walked past the cut-flowers and, realising there was still time to start growing my own that summer, went home, dug the turf from a 3m x 4m chunk of our garden – and got planting.

I didn’t want an idyllic cottage garden border; I wanted flowers to cut for the house – and buckets of them. Minus any gardening knowledge, but with the help of a niftily predesigned planting plan and a tin of seeds, I managed to raise my own tiny, delicate plants for the first time ever.

There were some failures. My sweet peas were weedily unproductive, about 20% of my other seedlings died early on, and the slugs munched on my just-emerging dahlias.