The mood of this gorgeous book, Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden, goes right to your heart.  Deep, rich and love-filled, in many ways its enormous wealth of useful information is wrapped in the hug of life where family and flowers are the center of it.

 

Cutting flowers has perennially been a conundrum for gardeners.  We nurture our plants so carefully to entice their blooms that it feels a bit sacrilegious to then lop them off and put them in a vase to die within a week, right?  

 

That is why, as author Erin explains, one must approach the idea knowing that this particular group of flowers IS for harvesting by planting a “Cutting Garden.”  Your bulbs or seeds go in the ground with the purpose of generating amazing blooms for bouquets, vases, flower projects and gifts.

 

Lavish photography embraces a comprehensive, easy-to-follow, step by step guide for creating your own Cutting Garden of any size.  She even explains flower nomenclature (if you don’t know that word, check out p.22).

 

I personally have erratic sun in my yard over the course of the year.  The structure of my house is shaped around the back yard like a ‘U’ so even throughout a single day every spot in the yard is at sometimes in the sun and again in the shade—a lifelong frustration here for figuring out what to plant where!  After devouring Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden, even I have discovered how i can plot a cutting garden of my favorite dinner plate dahlias.  Erin showed me how to locate and mark the space in the yard that gets 6 hours of sun per day, during the right season.  And…she showed me how to grow deliciously-scented sweet peas….vertically.

 

What’s really great about this book is that Erin speaks 100% from personal experience, so her advice readers springs forth from that.  For example she says ignore the back of the seed packets that advise wide spacing of annual plants.  She knows that spacing them much closer together in a dense planting yields 3 to 4 times as many flowers as a bed would using the seed packet recommendations.

 

I loved that every page is filled with beauty and color and that all of the photos include Erin on her farm actually doing the work.  This book is clearly written by someone living what she is writing about, which enhances significantly her authority and advice.

 

I seriously would have bought this book just for how good it looks on my living room coffee table.  I am doubly glad I read it too and I think you will also be.

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Review by Siri Jostad