The ones worth the space, and why the best of them are never in a shop
Beautiful in a garden and beautiful in a vase are not the same test, and the flowers that win the first often lose the second badly. The most useful way to choose what to grow is not to ask what looks best in a photograph. It is to ask what you cannot get any other way.
These six earn their space on looks alone, and every one of them is better from a garden than from a shop.
Nothing else opens like a peony, and the season is so short that a plant in your own garden is worth more than any number of trips to buy them.
About Peonies
Months of flowers from one tuber, in more forms than any other genus here, and the more you cut the more it produces.
About Dahlias
The scented, many-petalled roses that commercial growing has mostly abandoned, because they open too fast to ship.
About Garden Roses
Real blue, at head height. There is very little else in the garden that can say that.
About Delphiniums
The one flower where growing your own is not a preference but the only way to get the scent. It does not survive the journey.
About Sweet Peas
Layer on layer of tissue-thin petals, and a plant that flowers for weeks in cool weather when almost nothing else is up.
About RanunculusThe whole cut flower trade runs on flowers that can be cut hard in bud, packed dry, flown and then revived. Anything that cannot do that is either expensive, poor by the time it reaches a shop, or simply not sold. Those are the ones to grow.
Scent is the first thing bred out of a commercial flower, because it costs vase life and it does not show in a photograph. In a garden it is the whole point.
Two things decide more than the seed choice does: sowing hardy annuals in fall instead of spring, which brings them into flower weeks earlier and on stronger stems, and planning a single bed properly rather than scattering flowers through a border.
Sowing hardy annuals in fall and what to plant in a cutting garden when you only have one bed.
If this is a first attempt, start with flowers that forgive a lot. These germinate readily, flower quickly and do not need staking, feeding or lifting.
The flowers worth growing are, almost exactly, the flowers the trade cannot handle. Everything a commercial grower selects for, straight stems, tough petals, a long cold journey, works against scent, softness and the varieties that open fastest. A garden has none of those constraints, which is why a homegrown sweet pea beats anything money can buy and why the shop cannot sell you one.
Read about any of them in the flower directory, or see what is worth buying rather than growing in the seasonal guide.
Browse detailed guides for every flower mentioned in this article
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