Grow Your Own Cut Flowers: a practical, step-by-step guide to growing the best flowers to pick and arrange at home

Description

Grow Your Own Cut Flowers distils everything Sarah Raven has learnt in five years of trialing, teaching, learning and cultivating the best possible cut flowers for growing at home. If you want to grow your own cut flowers, there could be no better guide in the world. The book ties-in with an eight-part five-minute mini-series on Gardeners' World in spring 2002. Grow Your Own Cut Flowers is for the flower arranger who wants to grow their own flowers, but has never gardened before, and for the gardener who knows how to grow their own flowers, but wants ideas to fill their house with their harvest.

Sarah Raven, writer, cook, broadcaster and teacher, is the expert on all things to grow, cut and eat from your garden. Sarah is a presenter on BBC Gardeners' World, she writes for The Daily Telegraph, Gardens Illustrated, Gardeners' World Magazine, and Domino Magazine (US) and has been a guest on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and the Food Programme. Her gardening and cookery books have won her a number of awards including Best Specialist Gardening book for The Cutting Garden and Cookery Book of the Year for Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook. Her latest book looks at the vital role Wildflowers play in the British countryside. She also had a well-received TV series (BBC2) in Spring 2012 called 'Bees, Butterflies and Blooms' on the crisis of insects and Sarah's attempts to flower up the nation to hugely increase insect food and habitat supply. Sarah is an inspirational and passionate teacher, running cooking, flower arranging, growing and gardening courses at Perch Hill, her farm in East Sussex, and around the country, since 1999. She is married to the writer Adam Nicolson and has two daughters and three stepsons. They divide their time between Sissinghurst Castle and Perch Hill Farm.

Everyone loves cut flowers in the house but many gardeners are loathe to cut flowers from their own gardens for fear of diminishing the dispay outside. Sarah Raven, doyenne of the cutting garden, attempts to dispel that myth in "Grow Your Own Cut Flowers", showing how the choice of plants grown affects their cutting and reflowering abilities thus getting the best of both worlds. From small town gardens to larger country gardens such as Sarah's, annuals, biennials and bulbs can be grown in such a way as to provide fresh cut flowers throughout the year. Either interspersed amongst existing borders or grown separately in a cutting garden, beautiful arrangements can be simply made whilst leaving a still colourful border intact. Easy to read, although at times more advanced than necessary for a newcomer, it gives clear instructions on how to grow the best plants, both floral and foliar, from seed, cuttings, bulbs and tubers. Cutting garden designs are included along with the best methods of sowing and aftercare. Comprehensive plant lists follow each plant type with descriptions, roles and uses together with any specific growing requirements. The book ends on examples of flower arranging and their techniques in typical Raven style - original, eclectic, bold and absolutely stunning. Beautifully photographed at Sarah Raven's house in Perch Hill, Sussex by Jonathan Buckley, the photographs inspire the reader to find out how they too can create such arrangements for themselves. As Sarah says in her introduction, "it is the generous gardener who has the most flowers" and by growing the plants in this book not only will you have a house full of flowers but a garden full too.