What’s in the vase — and why
Late-sown annuals and dahlias
September is one of our favourite months for flowers.
It might feel as though the garden should be beginning to wind down, but for us, this is when some of the plants we grow specifically for cutting are really coming into their own.
A lot of that is deliberate.
Rather than sowing all our annuals in one go in early spring, we sow our tender annuals in May, and even into June. The idea is simple: to have fresh flowers coming through later in the summer, when some of the earlier plants are beginning to run out of steam.
Two of our favourites are cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) and zinnias (Zinnia elegans).
Cosmos are wonderfully generous plants. Their flowers have that slightly informal, just-picked quality we like, while their long stems and feathery foliage make them particularly good for loose arrangements.
Zinnias are almost the opposite: stronger, more structured flowers in an extraordinary range of colours. They really reach their stride in late summer and early autumn, and are excellent cut flowers, lasting remarkably well in a vase.
We grow Nicotiana (tobacco plant) too. The taller varieties bring height and movement to an arrangement, with delicate flowers held above the stems. Some are also beautifully scented, particularly later in the day.
And then there are the dahlias.
Originally from Mexico, dahlias are one of the great flowers of late summer and autumn. Ironically, the prolonged heat and drought we’ve had this year hasn’t particularly helped ours. Some have been noticeably held back, and we’re only now beginning to get the abundance of flowers we normally associate with them.
A long-standing favourite is Dahlia ‘Karma Choc’, with its extraordinary dark, velvety red flowers. ‘Labyrinth’ is new for us this year and has been a bit of a revelation — huge, slightly unruly flowers in shades of peach, apricot and pink. And ‘Wittman’s Superba’ remains another favourite.
There is a longer game to all this, too.
Some of the flowers we cut this year started life as seed last summer. Biennials such as Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) are sown around June or July, grown on through their first year and then start to flower the following summer. However, if you sow them under glass in February or March, you can treat them more like annuals, and they’ll reward you all the way through to the first frosts.
So although the vase on the table might look wonderfully spontaneous, quite a lot of it was actually planned months — and sometimes more than a year — earlier.
That’s one of the things we like most about growing our own flowers at The Fisheries. What appears on the Workers’ Lunch tables, at an event or on reception changes with the season, but it also tells you a little bit about what has been happening in the garden long before the flowers were picked.
Our favourites at the moment
Cosmos — ‘Apricotta’, ‘Double Click Cranberry’, ‘Purity’
Zinnia — ‘Queen Lime Orange’, ‘Jazzy Mix’, ‘Dreamland Pink’
Dianthus — ‘Amazon Neon Purple’, ‘Sooty’, ‘Scarlet Beauty’
Nicotiana — ‘Mojito’, ‘Bronze Queen’, ‘Only the Lonely’
Most of our seeds are either collected from the garden or bought from Chiltern Seeds, and we buy our dahlias…
