Making the cut

In the last few years, as my hobby of gardening has grown, so has my affection for cut flowers. Each year, I seem to cut more of my plants to display inside our house and I seem to plant more things that I can cut!

I'm not too keen on buying cut flowers, although occasionally I will. There is a great vendor at the local farmers' market that sells beautiful cut flowers--and they sell organic bread and produce, too! The cut flowers don't seem to last too long for the money, though.....so, it does give me great pleasure to head outside with my snips and find something to fill a little jar or vase. I have two sets for cutting. The blue set has a little guard over the blade and a spot on the handle that you can use to strip leaves off the stems. That set hangs in my garage by the man-door. The smaller set stays in my drawer in the kitchen. They are handy for trimming stems for the days after you have put your flowers in water.

Here are some shots of some of my cut flowers from the last several weeks.

On this tray, I grouped some glass vases and filled with some Knockout roses, catmint and sage. Although I use my herbs for culinary purposes, I also really like to cut them. They provide some nice texture and also the smell is lovely!

I cut these allium bulbs and put them in small glass pitcher. They are on our bookshelves in the living room.

I have a trio of bud vases on my mantel. During the growing season, I put anything and everything in those. During the winter, I usually put some seed heads from ornamental grass. Here is a shot of oregano that has been cut and put in the little vases.

Here is a pic of the same vases with coneflower:

My favorite picture is this one:

I recently bought those little vases at IKEA....I like their modern look. The flowers are snapdragons. I have a few tall varieties planted that are perfect for cutting. Also, they are cold hardy, so last fall, my snaps bloomed all the way through October and threw down some seeds so I could have some free plants this year. ; )

Just a little bit of green and color around the house brightens it up so much.