Perennial cut flowers are the back bone of my cutting garden; here is why.

I grow cut flowers for a living…..why would I encourage you to grow your own flowers? For the very reason that I grow cut flowers, and why we bring cut flowers into our houses in the first place - because it is food for our wellbeing, food for our souls. There is such a deep joy and satisfaction in arranging flowers that you have grown The flowers become more than a pretty decoration - representing achievement and deep satisfaction, giving a sense of season, time, place and o

Left: Rhododendron 'COS' enmass in a vase. Right: Table Centre piece featuring R. maddenii. When you think about cut flowers, I bet you don’t immediately think of Rhododendrons. Here in Dunedin, the Himalayan natives grow so well and have become so much a part of our city's identity, that we have a Rhododendron Festival at our local Botanic Garden. We would be remiss not to include them in our floral design to contribute a scene of place and season. October is the height of

The Journey In 2018 we set about building a cut flower field in the steep muddy eastern facing field next to our house and garden.  By no means the ideal location for a flower field, I was determined to create a space for growing on the land we had adjacent to my family's established gardens - which my mum had always called Maytrees, due to the hawthorns amongst the native scrub regeneration.  At the time I was working in a beautiful florist shop, and as florists we had an i