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Your garden is full of beautiful blooms – but you can’t bring yourself to cut them? It’s okay to do so – you will probably be doing your garden a service. Cutting blooms can encourage more flowers to grow so the flowering period may be extended throughout the summer, and possibly even into early autumn. It’s just like deadheading – by cutting the flowers, you will be delaying the formation of fruit. So, go ahead, cut some of those lovely flowers and enjoy the beauty and scent of your garden flowers inside your home, as well as outside.

Prolonging the life of cut flowers
Exposure to the air, even for a few minutes, has a detrimental effect on a flower’s ability to take up water, since the cells in the stem start to seal up. So get your flowers into water as soon as you can. Ideally, place them in a bucket of water as you cut them in the garden. When you are ready to arrange them, take them one at a time from your bucket, trim and place in the vase. Don’t keep them out of water for more than a few seconds if possible.

Trim the flowers, cutting a couple of centimetres to expose fresh stem at the bottom. If you cut at a 45 degree angle, a greater surface area of stem will be exposed to water in the vase, so more water can be absorbed. Remove any leaves or foliage that will be underwater, to help keep the water fresh.

Place the flowers in lukewarm water – a little warmer than body temperature. Warm water molecules will move more quickly up the stems. Remember, though, that bulb flowers such as tulips and hyacinths need cold water.

You can also buy powdered preservatives from florists, for adding to the vase water, and this can help your flowers last longer.

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