Grow Cut Flowers from Plug Plants -

Start a Cutting Garden

It’s so easy to get a cut flower garden on the go using plug plants. Plant them into dedicated beds and borders, or in pots, ready to flower from early summer through to late autumn. Here is a selection of our cut flower plug plants - with plenty of big blooms, small blooms & filler foliage to choose from.

Choose the perfect mix

Make sure you grow a mixture of different types of flower and foliage so that you can arrange them together in a vase or a hand-tied posy:

Big Blooms – the star performers

These have big impact and become the focus point of any flower arrangement, no matter how amateur it may be! Zinnia makes a good choice, with its large, striking pink flower heads, and Larkspur is another good example, with tall, majestic spikes of flowers perfect for larger vases and jugs. Snapdragons could easily fall into this category in smaller vases.

Small Blooms – the supporting act

These flowers offer moral support to the bigger blooms but are an important player in giving life and a sense of roundedness to your flower arrangements. Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella) and Cornflower are both really good in this role with their delicate flowers and slender stems, and Sweet Peas work well too.

Filler Foliage – the finishing touches

You may find your arrangement looks a little sparse somehow, a little incomplete. If that’s the case, you’re probably lacking a bit of filler foliage. Hare’s Ear is a wonderful all-rounder, and popping a few spikes of these delicate stems with their tiny flowers really helps to bring things together. Another choice would be Honeywort, which has the added benefit of beautiful purple-blue flowers.

All Cut Flower Plants

Growing & Cutting Advice

Caring for your flowers

Regular watering, particularly while the plants are still young, is important. Best to water early morning so that the soil can dry out again before dusk to keep slugs to a minimum.
It is best to give the plants some support. Do this at the point of planting. We’d recommend stretching some wide gauge netting between bamboo stakes driven in at the corners and edges of beds – position it so that the net sits horizontally, approximately 30cm above the seedlings.
All our cut flowers are best treated as annuals, and can be cut back at the end of the season. However you can leave them to self-seed in autumn if you like.

Cutting your flowers

The best time to cut flowers is early morning (or evening) – if you cut them in the middle of the day they tend to droop!
It’s best to cut just before/as the bud starts to open. Strip off the lower leaves as you pick (the leaves that would be below surface level once in the vase)
Cut stems a little longer than you need for your vase, being sure to leave some side shoots on the plant and most plants will then keep growing flowers for you throughout the summer.
Have a bucket of water with you so that you can pop stems straight into water as you harvest your flowers. Put the bucket and flowers into a cool, shady spot for an hour or so until you are ready to put them into vases – this will give them a chance to draw up some water and recover from being cut!
When it comes to arranging, use a pair of secateurs to cut the stems at an angle so that they don’t sit flat on the base of vase – this’ll prolong their lifetime a little.