A gentle walk around my garden

Step inside my special place

In the spring of 2019 I built a cut flower patch out of a piece of forlorn looking land at the bottom of my garden. Back then there was nothing in it save for a few straggly raspberry bushes and a single apple tree whose trunk was so bent it appeared to be weeping silently into the ground. 

I didn’t know what to do with this scrap of land. There was a high beech hedge in it, an old shed and at the farthest end views out to the Kentish fields beyond. I was no gardener in those days. I wasn’t even sure what I enjoyed and what I didn’t. Did I like calm, shady gardens with cool corners in which to sit and read? Or did I prefer the more controlled look- crisp hedges, a striped lawn and neat swathes of perennials (not that I knew what perennials were, you are to understand) in shades of clotted cream and milk. But here’s what I did know: I knew that I loved flowers in the house.

‘So why don’t you build a cut flower garden,’ a friend suggested.

The idea of a garden just for flowers felt both extravagant and a little silly. Besides, I could only think of flowers for spring and summer, which would mean the rest of the year the garden would be empty.

Still, I was persuaded. And so it was transformed.

We started with six wooden raised beds made from old railway sleepers, a gravel path and a little white summer house where I could do random things like sort out seed packets (very satisfying) and have a cup of tea in peace. But over the years I’ve mixed things up- this year we added more beds for vegetables, gave the shed a glow-up and replaced the gravel path with a reclaimed brick one.

Over the years I’ve experimented with what I grow too. I started with just tulips for spring and dhalias for summer and autumn. That was it. But over the years I’ve jazzed up that simple list - there are now giant maroon sunflowers for high summer and fluorescent-pink sweet peas that fill my offices with a scent no Diptyque candle could ever match. Winter meanwhile brings delicate narcissi that I decorate with fairy lights and branches of quince that arch their way across the dining room table.

This summer the cutting garden has really come into its own and so I took a video to share with you. It looks a little wild around the edges for my liking (it appears I enjoy both shady secret corners and crisp, tight hedges) but it is the magnificent jumble of flowers I wanted to share with you. They are an absolute treat and have filmed my home with blooms for months. These are not flowers to be found in supermarkets or even the most adventurous of flower stalls. These are rare things to bring joy every day- whether you have just a window sill (and you can grow a lot) or a whole garden to give over to cut flowers.

I’ve also listed every flower and where I buy them so you can order them early. (You don’t need a garden to grow much of this stuff by the way. Two planters would give you enough flowers for the entire summer if you bung something like Cosmos in them and keep picking!).

Happy Sunday

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