Grow your own flowers to cut
PHILADELPHIA — Five years ago, an immense — and diseased — oak tree in Betsy Teutsch's backyard in Philadelphia's West Mount Airy neighborhood had to come down.
The family mourned the loss of an old friend. And then Teutsch realized that this ecological tragedy was an unexpected horticultural gift.
Suddenly, there was light! Enough for an old-fashioned cutting garden with sun-loving flowers that Teutsch can pick and enjoy inside all summer long.
"I love plants and flowering plants," says Teutsch, who runs a Judaica business from home. "This will be a fun challenge."
Because she's the kind of person who "loves gardens but not gardening," Teutsch hired garden designer Charlotte Kidd to orchestrate this challenge. It was Kidd who suggested a cutting garden planted with bright, relatively carefree summer annuals.
She's working on the design now. And while the particular flowers haven't been chosen yet, Kidd already has a sense of what the look and feel of the project will be.
"Airy and romantic, festive, bright ... and it'll bloom a lot," she says.
In practical terms, that means flowers with tall stems and gorgeous blooms that can make any kind of arrangement Teutsch wants. One that emphasizes pale colors and soft lines, perhaps, or one that highlights bold colors, or one color, or the plant's dramatic architecture or foliage.
Cutting gardens have always provided cheerful blooms and an outlet for artistic expression, usually for the lady of the house. Needless to say, said lady was usually wealthy and her house and garden very large.
Pamela Cunningham Copeland, wife of Lammot du Pont Copeland, had an 11,000-square-foot cutting garden (roughly 105 feet by 105 feet) at the couple's elegant neo-Georgian mansion in Greenville, Del. In 2002, the home became the nonprofit Mount Cuba Center for the study of regional native plants.
The Rosengartens, whose Chanticleer estate in Wayne, N.J., became the eponymous public garden in 1993, had a sizable cutting garden on a hillside. The current one is smaller by Rosengarten standards but still roomy, at 100 feet by 40 feet.
Ordinary folks, going back at least to ancient Egypt, have cultivated flowers for secular or religious use. This was first written about in medieval times, when garlands adorned women's hair and monastery altars.
"Also, if you think about it," says garden historian Jenny Rose Carey, "during medieval times it was very smelly, so lavender and all those wonderful fragrant things were used to overcome the 'odeur' of unwashed bodies."
More recently, she says, "even in the humble cottage garden, people would take seeds of maybe roadside flowers and bring them into the garden to have flowers for cutting. Whatever level of society they were in, they would've wanted something to put in the house."
Carey, director of Temple Ambler's landscape arboretum, planted a cutting garden at her Victorian home in Ambler last summer. It was so lush she had enough snapdragons, dahlias and zinnias to make all the bouquets and table decorations for a friend's Labor Day wedding.
"It was quite lovely," she says.
Even so, cutting gardens were meant to be workhorses, not showoffs. They often were planted in out-of-the-way spots and designed more like a vegetable patch — densely packed, in plain-Jane rows, with paths for easy access.
And always, they needed six to eight hours of what Kidd calls "real sun."
"Don't fool yourself that a spot that gets three hours a day will be sufficient for sun-loving plants," she warns.
Horticulturist Doug Croft, who oversees Chanticleer's cutting and vegetable gardens, has another take on the cutting garden. Rather than place it "out of the way, on the back nine," he says, "I think you really do want to integrate your cut-flower garden into your larger garden."This is especially true if you have less than an estate to work with."Think of the garden as one big cutting garden," Croft says. "You can really cram more in if you're using every space."This approach keeps you thinking about your garden in every season, not just summer, he says, and as you maintain it, you naturally select what looks great in a vase."When you're pruning your shrubs, you walk away with a handful of red berries or greenery for your arrangements," Croft says.He and Kidd sometimes augment their arrangements with perennials like echinacea or butterfly bush and unusual-looking vegetables — kohlrabi, peppers, burgundy okra, and, if you can stand the smell, kale."I like soft and round and tall and spiky, lots of variety," says Kidd, who has a generic cutting-garden design that mixes 12-inch zinnias with 36-inch Mexican sunflowers and 48-inch dahlias and cosmos.But growing your own flowers isn't just about aesthetics. It's about thinking globally. Most of the blooms we buy in this country — $6 billion worth a year — come from elsewhere on the planet and require enormous amounts of fossil fuel to reach us."I'm going local," says Teutsch, Kidd's West Mount Airy client. "What could be more local than your backyard?"Imported flowers also are sprayed with fungicides and pesticides, rarely have a fragrance, and sometimes shrivel up in a few days. How many of us have had this experience with, say, bouquets from the supermarket, where Americans now buy half their cut flowers?Teutsch is through with all that. She relishes the thought of her 1/3-acre yard, warm and yellow in the summer sun, turning into a glorious flower patch.She sees herself strolling among the rows, a true lady of leisure, wondering: What shall I pick today? Pink zinnias and rosy cleomes? Or orange cosmos and golden sunflowers?An impossible choice."That will be the fun part," Teutsch says.
