A Gardener's Guide To A Year Of Cut Flowers

You don't need a flower field in the countryside to grow cut flowers, arrange beautiful floral displays or connect with nature.

A simple patch of earth is plenty. In Grow and Gather, you'll follow the annual cycle of growing cut flowers, from sowing in spring to seed-collecting in autumn.

Simple projects show you how to plant and nurture various flowers, as well as demonstrating the importance of texture, colour and shape when arranging them.

Together with these practical projects, tips and hints, flower field gardener and clinical psychologist Grace Alexander guides you in the art of meaningful, engaged and intentional gardening – through mindful growing, you can transform your wellbeing and find a greater connection to your garden and yourself.

Grace knows a bit about the need for escapism. When she isn’t packing seeds, turning a back lawn into a kitchen garden or debating the pros and cons of yellow Pompom dahlias (they give great dye colour but they are oh so ugly), she is an expert witness psychologist in the UK family courts. The days might be a bit grim, but the weekends are filled with dogs, tea, flowers and the wondrous experience of life in a Somerset thatched cottage.

She has been gardening forever, off and on. What she lacks in technical brilliance, she makes up for with experience and enthusiasm. Her growing space (about a quarter of an acre, tiny) was all developed from scratch in 2013 and has been going from strength to strength ever since. It includes an orchard, a flower field, meadows and a kitchen garden.

She is, believe it or not, a registered and certified APHA seed-merchant. She has been growing flowers for sale (either as flowers or for seed) since 2013 and launched her new, exciting passion project, Gather with Grace Alexander, in August 2020. She is not a person of half measures so she doesn’t really have hobbies or interests, she has obsessions and all-consuming passions. Currently, Japanese textiles and dyeing, unusual winter squash varieties, chronically under-exposed photography, and building hazel domes for old roses. Always dogs though, always.

Follow Grace on Instagram @gracealexanderflowers

Gardening

Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden - Erin Benzakein

Floret Farm's A Year In Flowers - Erin Benzakein

Grow And Gather ~ Grace Alexander

Bagru Pot Plant Bucket ~ Medium