In her eyes, a backyard floral spot is just as lovely as Monet’s Garden in Giverny
“Want to see my cutting garden?”
She nodded and, with that, my friend and I took the short trek across my backyard for a little garden tour.
A cutting garden is a space designed not for landscaping interest but to simply grow flowers to harvest for bouquets. Mine is a small and, currently, pretty sparse space surrounded by a mismatch of cheap, wire fencing and two different colored mulches. Most of the plants are still seedlings, and only one has started to flower, but in my eyes it’s as beautiful as Monet’s Garden in Giverny or Kew Gardens in London.
The thought-spark for a cutting garden began eight summers ago when I was carefully snipping phlox from different flower beds around our house. My mission was to get enough blooms for a bouquet, but leave enough in the landscape to be pretty. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a garden just to grow bouquet flowers?”
I pulled out the computer in my pocket and found a cornucopia of recommended plants and garden plans for just such a flower bed. My long list of cutting garden flowers, and a little dream, began.
When we moved into our house in 2002, it was brand new with freshly laid sod and no landscaping. Anything planted in our yard was done by me. Nothing was really planned, it just happened little by little. A shrub or tree here, a butterfly garden there…what if we had a garden with all our birth month flowers? But the cutting garden? It was going to be a plan, not a happening.
A large, dead catalpa tree brought a landscape company to my house for a removal estimate. I asked them to also prepare a flower bed along the back fence line in full sun and, over the next few years, l annually amended the soil and mulched the small, empty bed. Did my family think me working compost and weeding an empty garden bed for years was weird? Sure. Did I care? Nope, it was a work in progress.
Finally, when two of the three kids were in college, I got some small plants and started to fill the garden space. I bribed my teen son to weed it while I was away for a few weeks, which he did. He also managed to pull up and throw out all the baby plants so, once again, I had a naked garden. I had lost both the plants and the oomph to replant. “Someday,” I told myself as laid some thick mulch, and tucked the dream away until the next summer.
And the next.
And the next…and the next. The important things in life kept my “Someday” not today, and the bountiful garden of Insta-gorgeous rows of flowers grew only in my head.
“Someday” finally came. Earlier this year, I cleared the final weeds, amended the soil, hauled out the old cutting garden flowers list and bought seeds. When the garden centers started to stock plants, I got a few daisy, delphinium, coneflower and phlox. I planned out my short paths to get around the garden, and lined those plants and zinnia, cosmos, sunflower and Bells of Ireland seeds in (sort of) tidy rows.
And I waited. And watered and waited some more.
Which brought me to my garden tour. “I know that it doesn’t look like much, yet.” I told my friend. “But after eight years of waiting, working and dreaming, it’s a 10-by-10-foot beautiful work in progress.”
In that moment, I realized that everyone should have a cutting garden. Maybe not an actual garden with flowers, as that’s not everyone’s thing. But they should have a plan, a project, something that will enhance your life in some way. Do what you can, when you can and shrug off the setbacks, as you keep a little space in your life for your own garden of dreams.
Susan is a Kansas City based writer and podcaster. She is the co-host of the award-winning and long-running women’s history podcast, The History Chicks.
