Post written by student intern Josie Maahs.
A perennial cut flower garden symbolizes an important paradox; how beauty can be both fleeting, and enduring at the same time? The flowers last a few days in a vase on your kitchen counter, but the garden returns year after year to provide blooms from when the tulips come up in late spring until the last coneflower dies in the fall. It would be so special to be able to bring these flowers indoors to share with loved ones and neighbors, but it’s difficult to stomach cutting down more than a handful of blossoming plants. In an attempt to have the best of both worlds, I spent this semester designing a small perennial cut flower garden to be added to Allen Centennial Garden as a part of my senior capstone project. I chose to design this type of garden to make cut flower production more accessible and to help share the beauty of perennial plants beyond the borders of the garden.
Perennials are resilient plants. They don’t wilt or flop easily, and their long and tough stems mean that they’ll last for a while in a vase on your kitchen table. Some perennial plants also come up early in the spring and bloom late into the fall, ensuring that you have bouquets for any occasion for as long as the frost allows.
The first step in designing the garden was establishing my limitations. The space for this garden is flat and open, with its back to the fence surrounding Allen Centennial Garden. The soil in this area is known to have Verticillium wilt and jumping worms, two adversaries that limited which plants I was able to select. The location is sunny and will get good light from the early morning until the late afternoon, and it falls somewhere in between the USDA cold hardiness zones 5a and 5b.
Once I was well acquainted with these physical factors, I started to consider how I wanted my garden to look. Its purpose as a cut flower source and its responsibility to perform as an ornamental display helped me in determining the layout. In order to harvest my flowers, I have to be able to reach them, but rather than using traditional straight rows, I used a single zig-zag path to reach every blossom and add to the visual appeal of the garden. Measuring out the square footage was instrumental in determining the design and spacing out the beds (3 feet wide) and the path (2 feet wide) to make efficient use of my area as seen in Figure 1.
Once I determined the physical limits of my garden, I turned to the books, catalogs, and my colleagues to start amassing a list of potential perennial partners. Books like The Cut Flower Sourcebook: Exceptional Perennials and Woody Plants for Cutting by Rachel Siegfried and Specialty Cut Flowers: the Production of Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Woody Plants for Fresh and Dried Cut Flowers by Allan M. Armitage and Judy M. Laushman were great starting points, and helped me to see what perennials other growers had been successful with. Then I paroused the catalogs for the nurseries from which Allen Centennial Garden sources their plants to see which cultivars were actually available to purchase. Finally, I presented this list to my fellow flower friends, and listened to their comments and requests for different colors, shapes, and textures that would complement the plants they already grow and use for building bouquets. The garden was seeking plants that would bloom earlier in the year to help fill out the bouquets when the annuals are still sparse. The bloom calendar below (Figure 2) shows how long each perennial will flower for, as well as its color. Bloom calendars are a great tool to help you visualize what your garden will look like throughout the year.
My plant list was almost complete but there was one last thing that I wanted to consider when selecting plants. In her book, Sigfried groups plants into four categories: focal, filler, support, and final touch. Combining these plants in the right proportion creates a balanced and intriguing bouquet. Descriptions of each plant type and examples that I plan to put in this perennial cut flower garden can be found in Figure 3. Most bouquets use a lot of filler plants, and this is reflected in my plant list, as 70% of the flowers are considered fillers.
Once I had all of my ducks (or should I say plants) in nice neat rows on my spreadsheet, I set about placing them in the garden. I placed the larger, shade-loving plants along the back corner, and clumped the rest of the perennials according to size (larger in the middle) and color. A definitive spacing guide for a garden like this doesn’t exist, so I pulled information from the books I read, along with the spacing guides in the catalogs I had access to to come up with a compromise. Most plants are spaced one foot apart to maximize the flower production of such a small area, while also giving the plants some room to grow. Figure 4 shows my plant map and the final spacing map.
The first steps in implementing this garden plan have already been taken. Several plants have been ordered and will be planted this summer including; ‘Peter Cottontail’ yarrow, ‘Paradiso Super-Duper’ coneflower, ‘Husker’s Red’ beardtongue, and ‘Forescate’ chives. The garden path will be laid out, and the future plant orders will be placed and lovingly patted into the ground as they arrive over the next year or so.
Through this experience, I discovered that growing a perennial cut flower garden requires a lot of work on the front end- brainstorming, planning, and planting -but I am certain that the flowers of this labor will bring smiles and beauty into the dorms and dining rooms of Madison residents for years to come.