Dreams of a Cutting Garden - book reviews by Thea McGinnis

A cutting garden seems rather idyllic - picture a field with sunlight filtering through the morning mist, me wearing a gauzy, flowy dress, a large brimmed hat, a woven basket on my arm and a good pair of shears in my hand.  I'm barefoot, of course, and accompanied by my trusty pup who never strays off the path to crush any buds.  Ahhh, sounds pretty, pretty good.

This summer I've been reading like mad.  Okay, I read like mad all the time, but late summer is the perfect time to slack off with a good gardening book and read a hot and humid day away -- and perhaps dream of incorporating something new in next year's garden.  My friend, Jenny, dreams of a cutting garden (see her blog about it here) and recognizes the process involved. We can't simply snap our fingers and viola! a full grown cutting garden appears. There is work involved.  Two books I highly recommend if you're interested in adding a cutting garden are written by two women who are in the business of cut flowers - on opposite sides of our country.

Lisa Mason Ziegler hails from Newport News, Virginia (near Colonial Williamsburg), where she operates The Gardener's Workshop, a private, urban wholesale cut flower farm. The family farm she happily married into is one of the only farms left inside the city limits, I believe.  Her business of cut flowers has expanded into public speaking, seeds, garden supplies, and workshops. I had the pleasure of meeting her when she came to speak at my garden club. And I sort of lost my dreaming mind shopping at her pop up garden store (see paragraph one). (I highly recommend having Lisa as part of your garden speaker program during the winter months.)

Lisa and her beautiful golden

Lisa's latest book is Vegetables Love Flowers : Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty.  I pre-ordered an autographed copy last year and it is jam packed with information on not only cut flowers but vegetable and flower companion planting.

When I lived on Humblebee Farm some years back, my husband put in a vegetable garden for us, all fenced in with lovely raised rows.  What I found out after the first year is that I didn't need to plant more than one or two zucchini plants as after awhile, I couldn't eat or give away all the zucchini I grew that year.  The same went for squash. Anyway, the next year, I decided to dedicate a row for some flowers into my vegetable garden. My husband wondered if I was wasting good vegetable growing space. If only I'd had this book back then! I would have planted that garden so differently.

I must say there is an abundance of tried and true practical garden information in Lisa's wonderful book. It's full of ideas you can incorporate into your gardens now and into the future. It's loaded with tips and techniques. I really do love this book. Lisa also has a great Facebook page and offers a free newsletter.  Lisa dedicated her book to her sister, Suzanne, with whom she works closely. Her book is available through her website here or through Amazon here .

Me. Pike Place Market.  Flowers! It was hard to choose, obviously. If you've ever been to the Seattle's Pike Place Market, you know how spectacular the locally grown flowers sold there are. 

I discovered Floret Farms and Erin Benzakein through Facebook.  I post quite a bit about gardening and through the mysteries of those good algorithms on FB, the Floret Farms page came up as a suggestion. Erin and her husband are in Washington State and began their cut flower farm in a region I believe the Universe has blessed with a prime environment for growing flowers.

Erin's book, Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden with it's gorgeous photography, is all about their journey from first house to first farm to a bigger farm as they began their cut flower farm business.  (And as an aside, Erin, too, learning gardening at her grandma's knee - a familiar history for many of our garden club members. Her book is dedicated to her Grammy.)  Not only is Erin a wife, mother, daughter, farmer and gardener, she creates exquisite floral designs.

This book showcases all her talents and hard work and how she's expanded her wholesale cut flower business to include workshops, an online shop and seed business. This book gives you seasonal step-by-step information for plant/grow/cut/arrange for all sort of flower types and a host of good (business) practices for keeping your garden.

For more information about Erin's work, visit her website here , Her book is sold on her website and is also available on Amazon here

What I love most about both Lisa's and Erin's books is you get to see some one's gardening dream come true, without hiding the mud, sweat and tears.  And how willing they are to share their vision with us. And they blog, too! So they themselves are a continuous source of news and information about the love and business of cut flower gardening from either coast.