Flower Power Bring The Outside Indoors With Colorful Selections From Your Own Cutting Garden

Flowers have the power to transform a room with life and color. While a house filled with flowers may seem like an indulgence, when they come from your cutting garden, you’re simply enjoying the results of your own hard work.

Make arrangements of all shapes and sizes, and keep them on bedside tables, the kitchen counter, in the guest room and family room and on your desk. Flowers do not have to be reserved for the dining-room table - or for the arrival of visitors.

Considering the price of cut flowers today, it certainly makes sense to turn part of your garden or yard into a cutting garden. For the cost of an average bouquet, you can purchase seeds that will provide you with flowers for months.

Choosing flowers

The flowers you grow and the care they need will depend greatly on your climate and soil conditions, as well as your own favorite flowers and colors. Here are some general guidelines to help you plan a productive cutting garden.

Choose carefully so you’ll have flowers throughout the growing season; annuals, perennials, and bulbs are all appropriate.

Good flowers for a cutting garden include zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, calendula, China asters, scabiosa, sunflowers and torch flowers (Tithonia). I also like delphinium, lavender, lavatera, Aster frikartii and Japanese anemones.

Tulips, daffodils, alliums, lilies and other flowering bulbs will be welcome in the spring.

If you like fragrant flowers, consider lilies, hyacinths, peonies, lilies of the valley and, of course, roses. If you like to dry flowers, plant some specifically for that purpose.

Don’t forget foliage, such as scented geraniums, hostas and ivy. It looks beautiful in the garden, and in arrangements, too. Herbs are another excellent addition. Fragrant and leafy, some even develop sweet little flowers.

Try to achieve a mix of colors, textures and sizes; this will enable you to create the most interesting and varied arrangements.

Traditionally a gardener was advised to plant flowers that coordinated with the colors in the house. I think it’s more important to plant flowers you love, in colors you love. You will find a place for them in your home - and you may even discover some wonderful new color combinations.

Planning a cutting garden

Unlike traditional flower beds, which are part of a well-planned landscape, a cutting garden is meant to be purely productive. For this reason, they were often placed in an out-of-the-way spot, out of sight.

Even if you don’t have the luxury of this sort of space, you can still have a cutting garden. It doesn’t require a lot of room, and it doesn’t have to be hidden - a cutting garden in bloom is beautiful, and you won’t deplete its supply all at once, leaving it bare.

A fine cutting garden can be created in just 200 square feet, but if you can allot a bit more room, do so. Choose an area with well-drained, humus-rich soil that gets plenty of sun.

Like a vegetable garden, a cutting garden is often arranged by rows. Not too long ago, I changed a vegetable garden into a cutting garden, and the transition was quite easy. It consists of 2-foot-wide rows with a 1-foot-wide path between them; some of the larger plants, such as sunflowers and Tithonia, require a double row. The garden is enclosed by trellises of climbing roses, which I also cut for arrangements.

With some clever planning, you can still plant a few flowers for cutting even if you don’t devote space for a separate garden. Choose some favorites, and add a few rows of them to your vegetable garden. Or employ parts of the garden that aren’t used through the entire season. Plant tulips and daffodils where the summer vegetables will be planted after the danger of frost is past, for example.

Look for flowers that don’t need much space, such as gladiolus corms, checkered lilies (Fritillaria meleagris) and snowflakes (Leucojum); tuck them in wherever there’s room.

Caring for your garden

In most parts of the country, the final frost date in midspring marks the time to plant many of the seeds and seedlings. It’s a good idea to fill in any holes caused by pests and weather with more seedlings sometime during the summer.

Spring-flowering bulbs, of course, are planted in the autumn. In the meantime, maintain the beds with watering, fertilizing, weeding and deadheading. This last step - cutting off spent flowers - is the most important; if plants are allowed to go to seed, they stop producing blooms.

Like any garden, a cutting garden needs your diligence, care and attention to thrive.

MEMO: Questions should be addressed to Martha Stewart, care of The New York Times Syndication Sales Corp., 122 E. 42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10168. Questions may also be sent to Stewart by electronic mail. Her address is: mstewart@msl.timeinc.com.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Martha Stewart New York Times Syndicate