Be Proud of Plants That Are up to Multi-Task
March 31, 2020 I was at the local Sam’s Club and noticed containers of organic maple syrup for sale. Growing up in the sugar maple forests of Quebec, I was reasonably familiar with the tapping of trees and collecting of spring sap. I don’t recall anything non-organic in the forests or in the boiling vats used to distill the sap. So, I wondered how the maple syrup of my youth differed from the organic maple syrup at Sam’s Club.
View all
Then I wandered over to the organic veggies section and found myself in the cut flower section (a whole section labeled as organic). I love cut flowers, organic or not, and to see them in every grocery store and club outlet like Sam’s does my heart good. My wife Susan and I probably lead the state in the purchase of alstroemeria for our dining room table. Yet, upon seeing the colorful bouquets, two things quickly came to mind.
Cut Flowers Make a Comeback
The first was the explosive growth of our domestic cut flower industry. The Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers (ASCFG) has seen a 150% increase in membership in the past five years and is probably one of, if not the, fastest growing trade organization in the country. Small farms, organic farms, and creative people are bringing their cut flowers to farmers’ markets, retail outlets, and anywhere local produce is sold. This is truly a good thing; kudos to all.
As I looked over the cut flowers at Sam’s Club, the second thing that came to mind was the number of gardeners who are always asking, “Dr. A, what can I plant so I can bring cut flowers inside?” Just as fragrance is coming back, so is the vase of freshly cut flowers from the garden. You would think this is a pretty easy question to answer, but we have made everything so short and compact in the last 10 years, the answer is not as simple as you would think.
Flowers With a Dual Purpose
Let’s look at a few plants we grow and sell that can be sold for the landscape and the vase. If they are fragrant as well, then their value doubles.
Shrubs: Few landscapers, designers, or gardeners think about cut flowers when planting shrubs. Yet, the flowers can be as popular indoors as they are outdoors.
Hydrangeas, buddleia, holly for fruit, lilac, elderberry, viburnum, weigela — to say nothing of forcing forsythia, cherry, and peach flowers from naked sticks.
Breeding landscape roses for toughness, fragrance, and a decent stem size is on the rise (e.g., Brindabella series from Suntory Flowers). They must be disease and virus resistant, and if fragrant, they must be irresistible both in the landscape and in the vase.
Annuals: Annuals are a mainstay for fresh flowers, and even though we have bred snapdragons, celosia, and zinnias so short and compact as to be groundcovers, enough older cultivars are sufficiently tall to harvest for the home.
Gerbera daisies, snapdragons, annual phlox, sunflowers, annual black-eyed Susan’s, celosia, zinnias, gomphrena, and larkspur are but a few.
Perennials: There is no lack of perennial flowers and stems that may be brought indoors. The term perennial still has a cachet for gardeners and landscapers, and letting people know they are also useful as cut flowers makes them even more special.
Yarrow, dianthus, asters, tall sedums, anemone, aster, baptisia, hardy mums, dahlia, cone flower, goldenrod, iris, salvia, culver’s root, and summer phlox work wonderfully well.
That plants can multi-task is not new. That they can double as cut flowers may still be secondary in the minds of landscapers and designers, but not so for gardeners. If the breeder, broker, and garden center staff are aware of the cut flower factor, they can easily enhance sales. Knowing that cut flowers are as organic as maple syrup may be important, but more important is letting people know that so many of the plants we sell can do many things at the same time.
For back pocket information, anyone can download my Great Garden Plant app. Then go to Menu > Solution Gardening > Plants for Cut Flowers.
Subscribe to eNewsletter
