Cut flower corner - roses in abundance
The peonies are beginning to wane, but the roses are coming in abundance. Some good varieties for cutting includes R. ‘Irish Hope’, a pale-yellow floribunda; R.’Winchester Cathedral’, a lovely white rose and R. ‘Queen of Sweden,’ which holds its head upright. Hybrid teas also make good cut flowers as they tend to have tall straight stems.
Cut roses when the buds are just opening, early in the morning, looking for strong stems, and put them straight into water. Use a feed in the water or a spoonful of sugar and change the water every day or every other day. Then try to keep them in a cool place in the house - the less direct sunlight they get, the longer they’ll last. You can also sear them in boiling water if they’re beginning to flop. With cut flowers, as in a garden, it’s lovely to have bigger blowsy blooms with some subtle lacy flowers like astrantia and umbellifers such as Ammi majus.
The fashion in floristry these days is very much to create a naturalistic look, which perfectly suits using season flowers from the garden. So, for your foliage you can add things like crab apple, hawthorn and the smaller fresh leaves of snowberry. Rosemary also works well as foliage for summer arrangements and Alchemilla mollis adds a wonderful lime green that seems to complement almost any colour from bright blue to dark pink. Then add some climbers such as honeysuckle, annual sweet pea and perennial sweet pea to trail around and add to that laid-back naturalism.
