WHAT I love most about my garden is I can always pick bunches of flowers to give away, and because I have a different mixture of different plants, no two bunches are the same. What’s better than picking your friend a posy of flowers for their birthday, or saying thank you to someone with homegrown flowers? My favourite flowers for picking this month are the following: Parsley flowers make such a pretty contrast against most other flowers in bunches, it has tiny white flowers and its seed head is a yellowy green lacy flat-topped cluster on an umbel shape. Alstroemeria: these beauties stand tall on their stems and come in lots of different colours and last for more than a week in a vase. n Another umbel shaped flower is the Achillea, the common name of which is yarrow and once again these come in yellows, pinks, apricots, reds and are so easy to grow. Once established they can easily be split to drift through your garden to give your more plants – or even pot them up and gift them someone. Teucrium Purple Tails is probably the one flower in a vase or in the garden that intrigues people the most as it has masses of spikes of gorgeous fuchsia-purple flowers held stiff and upright like a kitten’s tail. They start off a limey green and then from the bottom, they start changing to the purple colour and they last for more than a week in a vase and go through this colour change while in the vase. They are very hard and love a sun-free draining soil and dislike wet bottoms in winter. Feverfew has small white daisy-like flowers with bright yellow centres and lots of flowers on each stem so they are the perfect little plants for a cottage garden look and they self-seed freely so lots of free plants, and they look fab added to most flower posies. All these plants are so easy to grow, so if you have room, why not plant a picking garden so you can share the joy of flowers with your family and friends.
