Browse all Courses
Browse all courses / The Cutting Garden
Learn with Charlie Ryrie

The Cutting Garden

Learn how to grow flowers and foliage for cutting in your garden. Which flowers and foliage to grow, when to cut and how to maintain your cutting garden.

Course overview

There is nothing difficult about growing plants for cutting, but you must keep on top of specific tasks at the right time. The most important thing is to be realistic about space and time and decide what sort of cutting garden you want. Is it just for you or do you want extra for garden gate sales? Do you want a dedicated cutting area, or to cut from your borders? How much space and time can you allocate? What is your ground like? Do you have covered growing space? What sort of gardener are you? You'll learn how to make informed choices.

Meet Charlie Ryrie

Hello, I'm Charlie Ryrie. A journalist and passionate gardener for 25 years plus, in 2004 I traded the pen for the trowel and began The Real Cut Flower Garden, growing traditional and interesting varieties of flowers for cutting. We were the first company in the UK to send out bouquets of entirely home grown flowers nationwide and within three years had five intensively planted acres of mixed cutting plants. I now combine teaching with helping to run the original business, and in 2014 started The British Flower School (britishflowerschool.co.uk) to provide intensive flower arranging courses. I look forward to speaking to you in class and sharing my passion for cut flowers with you.

Course description

Wild gardener and pioneer of climate conscious cut flower growing, Charlie Ryrie teaches The Cutting Garden online course.

She'll teach you every stage of creating a garden for cut flowers and foliage from planting a cutting through to bloom time, how to choose plants which flower regularly, and how to extend your flowering season.

Choose the "Expert option" for personal feedback from Charlie on your assignments and cutting garden plans.

This course is for gardeners wanting to grow plants and flowers for home flower arrangements and floral designs, or for professional cutting garden growers. It is aimed at those with some basic gardening experience who would like to develop their skills, and for garden designers who would like to create cutting gardens for their clients.

You will be given the tools to start from scratch, and ideas for transforming an existing garden into a successful cutting plot with flowering shrubs, along with plants for foliage and flowers.

The course includes suggestions for a wide range of plants suitable for cutting, and tells you how and where to grow them, pick them and use them. You'll learn how to use every stage of the plant - from leaves to buds, flowers and seed heads.

It also gives you the confidence and knowledge to try slightly more unusual blooms as well as the old favourites.

Cutting garden space:

You'll need an area of the garden that gets a reasonable amount of sun, but you do not need acres of land, it is a matter of choosing the right plants for your situation.

In a space of 125 square metres/yards you could grow enough to fill your house with flowers and have plenty of spare flowers to give away.

Most established gardens already include some good cutting plants - many perennials benefit from being picked hard and give you a better second flowering because of it, and once a shrub matures you may hardly notice any difference in its size even when cutting fairly copious amounts of foliage from it.

Whatever your space, the knack of growing for cutting lies in choosing flowers that produce over several months as long as you keep picking them, and practising successional sowing to get two crops of quick maturing annuals a year in the same space.

 

You'll learn:
  • how to decide what type of cutting garden you want to grow
  • what tasks to do and when
  • the best cutting flowers and plants for cut flowers in every season
  • plants to grow for foliage
  • how to grow a mix of flowers for variation
  • when to sow
  • planning for successional blooming and extending your cutting garden season
  • how to deal with pests
  • when to cut and pick your flowers and foliage (including deadheading)
  • storing cut flowers
  • how to arrange the flowers you've cut from your garden
Time to complete this florist's cutting garden course:

Every student is different but in general we think the whole course will take around 9 hours 45 minutes to complete including:

  • Video lessons: 1 hour 45 minutes
  • Course notes: 30 minutes per lesson
  • Assignment: at least 1 hour per lesson
  • Interactive classroom time: 15 minutes per lesson
  • Tutor feedback review (Expert level): 15 minutes per lesson
The course includes:
  • On-demand video lessons - presented by Charlie Ryrie
  • lifetime access to the video, notes and interactive class
  • flexible classes - join and learn when and where you like
  • downloadable lesson notes
  • practical (optional) garden design, plant selection and planning and floral projects
  • access on your mobile, PC, Mac or laptop
  • small interactive online classroom chat online to students from around the world
Ready to get started?

Just add the course to your basket above - choose the 'Expert' option for personal feedback from Charlie on your cutting garden design and plant choices.

Any questions? Contact us by clicking on the orange speech symbol - we'd love to hear from you.