EP323- Creating A Cut Flower Garden With Fionnuala Fallon: Grow Better Cut Flowers

Want to grow your own cut flower garden ? Then this episode is for you.

 We’re joined by Fionnuala Fallon, Irish Times garden writer and a flower farmer growing on brilliant soil in County Laois, to unpack what it actually takes to produce beautiful, seasonal wedding flowers without leaning on synthetic chemicals.

We chat through the real foundations of sustainable flower farming: protecting soil health, keeping structure intact, and building fertility with local manures, straw mulches, and simple feeds like nettle tea. Fanula shares the practical decisions that helped her get beds established on a budget, including weed suppression and “little dig” cultivation when ground hasn’t been worked for decades. If you love cut flowers and want stronger stems with better vase life, the soil section alone is worth a rewind.

Then we get into propagation and seasonality for the Irish climate. You don’t need a polytunnel to raise great seedlings, but you do need light, frost protection, and reliable peat-free seed compost. We also talk about the tight harvesting window for local flowers, how late frosts can hit, and why many growers balance homegrown stems with carefully chosen imports. Along the way we share favourite plants for a home cut flower garden, including hardy shrubs and perennials that are often overlooked, plus practical dahlias advice for wet winters.

If you enjoy the chat, subscribe, share it with a fellow gardener, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s the one plant you’d grow first for cutting?

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_02 0:11

How's it going everybody and welcome to episode 323 of Master My Garden Podcast? Now, this week's episode is one I've been meaning to line up for a long time and it's one I'm looking forward to. I'm delighted to be joined by Fanula Fallon, and she's obviously the garden writer with the Irish Times. Many of you will have referenced her articles. In fact, I gave a talk last week at Ratville Flower Club, and somebody referenced an article you'd recently written there. But also she is a superb flower farmer, uh flower farm of five acres down around the Cullahill area of County Leash, which is actually brilliant land, but I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit. And uh it's a it's a newish flower farm, but the principles she works with is you know working with nature as much as possible, soil health and so on. A lot of what we talk about on the podcast on a regular basis, so this is going to be very interesting. And obviously, you guys, I know a lot of you are into cut flowers, so we'll kind of delve into that, maybe pick Fanula's brain a little bit on best best flowers and so on. Um, but Fanula, you're very, very welcome to Master My Garden Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here. And it is the fault is mine. I know you asked me before, I'm just not very organized, but it's lovely to be here and talking to you.

From Horticulture To Flower Farming

SPEAKER_02 1:20

Yeah, delighted to have you on. And yeah, it's uh it's obviously you know, for anyone that follows you online, your your work in terms of putting bouquets together and doing weddings, um it's next world, it's it's really top class. Um so maybe just tell us a little bit about how you ended up getting into flower farming. I know you you were at it previously before you you moved to Leash, but give us a kind of a little run-through.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Okay. Um, well, I suppose like a lot of people, I I've always like since I was a child, I loved arranging flowers. It's funny when something's right in front of your nose and you don't actually realise it until you're an adult. But I always loved gardening as well. The two went hand in hand, very much for me. Um, the flower farming part of it, I like I I studied horticulture in the National Botanic Gardens in Glass Devin as a mature student in my twenties. I'd studied philosophy before that, so it was a bit of a leap sideways. And I I came from a background in the arts, in the fine arts, so I think that was always in my blood anyway. I just love that world, the world of creativity, and I love the world of gardening as well. Um, and after I left the Botanic Gardens, I kind of got into the I suppose the world of garden writing. And I still work as a garden writer, as you say, written a few books and stuff like that. I'm working in a book at the moment, actually, on Kells Bay Gardens down in um in County Kerry. But simultaneously to that, yeah, I suppose probably the most kind of you know important kind of thing that kind of set me off in that direction was a visit to the flower farm of Kieran and Keelan Beattie in County Leitram. And it was actually Trevor Sargent, who was uh former minister for horticulture and a very keen organic um grower himself. And he I was writing about him for a book, I was writing a vegetable gardening, and he said, Listen, you have to um meet these people that are doing this amazing thing, down in Leitram, and they're growing um flowers on a flower farm. I'd never heard the expression flower farm before. I was really kind of intrigued. And yeah, I often say it was that Eureka moment. I went down there and I thought, God, this absolutely brings all the strands of what I love together. You know, it's it's about horse culture, it's about gardening, it's about creating, it's you know, about respect for nature, it's all those things, and it's just you know, for me, there was always that disconnect beforehand in gardening and and flower ending. When you went into a flower shop and you saw the flowers for sale in a typical, you know, flower shop, and they had nothing to do with what was growing in the garden so often. You know, there were like these two different worlds that didn't kind of connect. Um, and that was just really strange to me. And it kind of, I suppose it's one of the reasons why I never thought about being a florist actually. And then when I saw what they were growing, I saw the possibilities for flowers. I thought, wow, you can actually grow you know your own stuff and use this in flower ranging. How amazing is that?

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Yeah.

Moving To Laois For Soil

SPEAKER_01 4:01

So at the same time, a good family friend of ours in County Wicklow, a lady called Margaret Cully, who lived near us, and just about a mile down the road for us, such a lovely old Victorian property with um a wall garden. And she really beautifully maintained one half of it, along with like very extensive grounds outside of that. And she said to us, Listen, would you be interested, or do you know somebody who would be interested in using one half of this garden, you know, to grow stuff? And initially I didn't even think of us, and then I thought, actually, yeah, myself and my husband, Rich, would love to use this because we didn't have enough space growing. Space. Um, so we grew there for um about four years, from about 2015 to about 2000, about five years. 2015, we started. And in 2020, 2020, the pandemic hit, and Margaret also um coincidentally decided to sell the property and the wall garden was gone. But luckily, we had bought um an old farmhouse down in a leash that we've been tipping away for years, doing up um using sustainable methods, and it was kind of like that point in our our lives where we thought, okay, we need to move down and just move in. And it's funny what you say about good soil, because when I first went to see that house, I remember it was a very wet spring, and I got out of the car and I put my foot on the ground. I thought, oh my god, this is delicious soil. It's not waterlogged, it's not giving way under my feet, it is just the best soil. Yeah, we got a vibe off soil, like an energy off of when it's really good. And I got it off that land straight away. And it was one of the reasons that I really, really, really fell in love with the the building and the property.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Yeah, brilliant. It's a interesting story. So um you like definitely the land around Culhill is brilliant. There's yeah, like some people growing carrots and different things in that area, and it's right.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Our neighbors were saying that to us the other day, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Yeah, so I like and it is it's top class over that over that area, and even I see it myself when you're driving, you'd often see, you know, livestock out in various places over the world. Very early over there, either early or even sometimes over the winter. Yeah, which is yeah, which is really strange for me where I am, because I'm very, very wet. Um well, heavy is the word, not wet.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

And I came from my my childhood garden was a very heavy wet garden. And it was only uh later on that I realised actually not all garden sold are like this.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Some some are beautiful, and it was like, ooh.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Yeah, no, you could you can be lucky. My grandparents had a had a garden in Carlitown, and going off subject here, but they had um it was real sandy, loamy soil. And no matter when you walked on it, you pick it up and it just crumbles in your hands. Yeah. But there was still good life in it. It was really, really great soil, and it it would be similar-ish to that area where you are.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

It makes such a difference when you're growing to have good soil, like so much of like you don't have to put all that such an incredible effort, and you still have to mine and tend the soil, but not in the way somebody starting from a low base point has to.

Starting A Farm On A Budget

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Yeah. So tell us about so you move down, you you you start rejuvenating this uh old farmhouse, but tell us about the the getting the flower farm up and running. Like what was your procedures? How did you get started?

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Yeah, so like you know, we're still very much in the early stages. We don't have much money to throw at it. Um, you know, we were doing up the house at the same time. It was the pandemic. I I always kind of sometimes describe it like cross-laning in an airplane. You know, you kind of got out of the plane and went, what the hell happened there? You know what I mean? It's like just being jettisoned into a different universe, and it was fantastic at the same time, but it was just like, yeah, it was it was pretty overwhelming. Um, we were lucky with the soil. So I suppose to start off with, obviously, it was it's a very old, um, like very simple vernacular farmhouse, as I said, really good um soil, kind of southwest-facing um slope, um, generally free draining, and a few little wet spots on it, but generally very free draining. Um, but it hadn't been gardened in any sense. That was one of the curious things about it. There wasn't literally one plant from this, like it dates from the 1780s to 1800s, um, a kind of random rubble-built limestone um farmhouse that we kind of did a lot of the work on ourselves and using kind of furnac for materials and breathable materials. So we dug out the floors which were like hammered clay, and we, you know, repointed all the stone walls and got them lime plastered. And in the meantime, we were still trying to get the growing um going. Um, and anybody who will remember the pandemic years knows that the wedding industry was seriously disrupted. I mean, everything was disrupted, but obviously weddings were like just didn't happen. And if they did happen, then eventually they were happening on a much smaller, more intimate scale. And a way that was wasn't a bad thing for us because it gave us breathing space to start growing. Um, and also because we grow sustainably, we don't use any kind of like synthetic, nasty chemicals, like we don't use weak killers, we don't use like insecticides. So we had to do everything using kind of methods that were soil friendly and nature friendly. So the first thing we did was we designated a certain spot for growing in and we covered it with um black plastic and weighed it down just to kill off the weeds.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Um, I know there are people who who have issues with black plastic, but I suppose when you're weighing up the possibilities for weed suppression uh from a you know sustainable point of view, to me it's the best by far of a lot of you know options on a large scale. And then it's really effective.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

It's really effective and and and quite fast as well, you know.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

And you're not disrupting um the different layers of the soil, which is really important. Um, you're killing off weeds, but you're if you do it well, it's just really you know, it doesn't kill off all weeds, you still have very per persistent perennial weeds that you have to kind of tackle with after that. But for us, it was the best way to do it. And then we brought in a friend of ours, um, a great organic vegetable grower called Dermot Carey.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Do you know you probably not dermot well, yeah? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Dermot's amazing. Anybody knows Dermot, like he's just like such an amazing guy with kind of small farm machinery. And we generally we were we're not no dig, we're little dig. In this situation, we had to rotivate it because it hadn't been cultivated in like this area in probably 40 years, 50 years, and it was a little bit compacted, and we wanted to go so just to get rid of any um um persistent weeds, um, root systems. So we did that, and we then planted into that. That I was so desperate to get flowers in the ground. I I remember that the spring we moved in, we moved in in March, and by I think by uh May I was planting into this small area, and the just the sheer pleasure, being you know, yourself as a gardener, you know, being able to grow again, um, just being able to plant stuff, stuff I'd grown from seed, you know, I was growing amaranthus and cosmos and all these kind of absolute kind of cut garden staples that you need, and just the pleasure. I'll I'll never forget it actually, just the relief of being able to grow again.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Yeah, a bit of normality in what was a while.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Um so you say you're you're not no dig, but you're little dig. Um and and were you adding anything to the soil or were you happy with what you had there at that point?

SPEAKER_01 10:50

We had really, really good soil, and and the thing about soil, like again, like as anybody who knows soil knows that soil can get tired after it's been cultivated for a very long time. But the opposite of that is if you have a soil that hasn't been cultivated in a very long time, it's just full of vigour and life, and you're trying to preserve that as much as you can and not disrupt as much as you can. So we knew the soil around here already that was really good. Um, funny enough, the area that we first singled out is probably the area that's a little bit kind of wetter than other areas of the garden, but still like just really good, really fertile, like the the growth is really abundant. Um, but we do use different things to support soil health. So since then, like we have friends, um like labourers living in the area, one who's given us cow manure. We've got a lovely lady who lives down the road from us, a couple who runs stables, and we've got horse manure for them just recently. Um, we use things like um mulching with kind of um straw as well, so barley straw in the autumn. Again, um a neighbour of ours who grows barley, so we can mulch around shrubs like that. And then we use um things like um liquid nettle feed, for example, which is just this wonderful, absolutely brilliant kind of life-giving kind of boost for um plant health, just using nettles that we weed from the beds and stuff like that. So we do a lot of different things to support soil health.

Simple Propagation Without A Polytunnel

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Brilliant. And when you when you started, you mentioned seeds, you're you know, getting planting with plants that you're seedlings that you had grown from seed. Had you a polytunnel or greenhouse?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Oh, and you know, no, now this is because of where we were originally, we uh we couldn't put a polytunnel in the wall garden in Wicklum. But then a friend of ours, Jimmy Blake, whom I'm sure you know Jimmy. Yeah, Jimmy had a site up near him, near where we lived as well. We lived only like half a mile from Jimmy, and he had a site and he wanted to put in a polytunnel. And he said, Listen, you can put a polytunnel in here on my land. It's so sweet of him. And then in the end, actually, what we decided to do was to share a big polytunnel. So we both put our you know, our lump sums running towards a polytunnel. So we still have that. Brilliant polytunnel up there with Jimmy where we grow things like roses, it's like a commercial polytunnel size polytunnel, and we grow roses and dahlias and other choice kind of things that need to be undercover. And then here, no, like we're we're still having a kind of a discussion about where we want to put a polytunnel here because we don't want to occupy too much land. So, actually, it's amazing what you can do. In the meantime, I have a grow box, which we this is such a simple solution, I think, for anybody who doesn't have much money and just want to cultivate um stuff from the sea. So we wanted to have somewhere we could keep seeds frost-free, but give them the light they need and that it wasn't so warm. You know, when you have seedlings inside and they get all leggy weak. So we built a basic big timber box um and we lined it with roof insulation.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

And we you know, and we made sure it was high enough that uh it was about like say I suppose three, four feet off the ground, and we put the seedlings into that and we just cover them with um layers of fleece, and if it's really heavy, with a layer of really strong black strong clear plastic.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yeah. So that's our little that's our little or less like a yeah, like a coal frame essentially.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

It's like a very big coal frame. And if it's really, really cold at night, we have sheets of roof insulation that we just put on top of it.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Yeah, good idea.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah, and weigh it down with winds. Like it's it's just really cheap, really effective, and it means like anybody in any garden could do this on any scale.

SPEAKER_02 14:12

Yeah. I'm always talking about coal frame, like they're very underutilized. Like if you look back to the old gardens, they all had yeah, substantial coal frames, but like a simple coal frame is like very cost effective, and you can basically raise almost any seedling in it.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

It's this is it, this is it, absolutely. Um, and like we probably will get a polytone this this um um autumn, I think. But for us, it was like we were trying to still work at the layout of the land. We want to know where you wanted to put stuff, you wanted to, and we have a lot of old stone outbuildings that were really um kind of derelict, and we have a stonemason coming to start working one of those this autumn as well. So there's a lot going on. Do you mean it'd be like a lifelong project, I'm sure. I think we'll kind of come out at the age of 80, kind of saying our work finally done.

Seasonality Imports And Real Flower Costs

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Um so you you're up and running then with your with your polytunnel up in Wicklow and seedlings that you have yourself. And obviously, like we all know that it's much better to you know have homegrown flowers, less miles on them, less less chemicals, um just better for the environment generally. But that window, of course, of harvest is is smaller, and that's you know, I suppose where where flower shops have they've become 12 months of the year by importing.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

But I suppose realistically, we're we're probably looking here in Ireland at a harvest of probably up to nine months, would we?

SPEAKER_01 15:35

Um, you know, for the first four years that we grew flowers, we exclusively used our own flowers. You know, we didn't use any imported flowers at all. And again, the realization like of reality came. Like somebody said, You're gonna die up on that mountain vanilla, you know, where you realize actually it was your wind of opportunity to take on weddings was really much smaller.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

And also you were really, really vulnerable to um bad weather events, even with polytunnel growing. And at that point, we had two polytunnels and a glass house that we could use. Yeah, you know what I mean? So now we use a mix of imported flowers and our own flowers. I wouldn't want to be a flower farmer flowers without our own flowers. They make it a tremendous, tremendous like I can't explain the difference they make, and particularly as imported flowers have absolutely the cost of them since the pandemic has imploded. I mean, it's just incredible how expensive they are now. It's I should say exploded rather than imploded. It's kind of just huge. And the bigger reasons behind that are a lot of what we're seeing in terms of energy crisis and you know cost of living, all those things. But just to get back to your question about availability, I think if you're if you're a really good grower, you you'll start like you know, for example, uh I did a wedding this April 1st, April 2nd, I did a wedding yesterday where we used um some of our own flowers. So we had a lot of beautiful um narcissus and some anemones as well. Um so we mix those right through the the thing. So I would say typically if you're growing undercover, if you're in a good year, maybe towards the end of March you'll start picking stuff. You know, for example, we have cherry trees in blossom, and I also forage a lot. So for that same wedding yesterday, I foraged for cherry blossom along the roadside, just pick little bits here, little bits there.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Um, so I think that's when the season probably starts, kind of late March. And then really, really by the time you're into mid-September, I would say that's when it gets dicey. You might have a very mild autumn and it's absolutely fine, and it'll go on, and you'll be able to pick until kind of very late October or November. And that has happened to us, but you obviously couldn't rely on that. So if you've got one really harsh killing frost and you've away next week. Yeah, well, this is it. But also mid-September, I like it's funny, people always laugh at me, but it's true. You know, so many harsh frosts occur around the time of the full moon. So we always watch for the full moons and for severe weather events, and there's usually one around the middle of towards the third week of September that can be a really, really hard frost. And if you get your plants past that with the use of fleece and bayonet and cover, you can often extend the growing season, but you need to get over that hump of that mid-September to late September, killing frost.

SPEAKER_02 18:10

Yeah. Um, it's nice actually. The seasonality is really important. It we we should be doing it in food as well. I you know, on Grow Your Own Food courses, that I that's always what I talk about is we need to eat seasonal and not just be thinking because we eat whatever it is that we can have it all year round. The the seasonality is a nice thing. And you mentioned that wedding that you had the over the last couple of days to have Narcissus that, you know, a flower that is you know relevant at the moment, it it kind of ties to the occasion. It's it's it's a nice one, I think.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

If you see here behind me, actually, that's the narcissist talia, which is also known as the orchid daffodil, and it's just this exquisitely beautiful flower, like multi-headed. It's a really it's a heritage variety. It's I think it's about a hundred years old, it's Dutch bred, it's kind of from Narcissus Triandris. I'll just pull that out and show them.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

And I can see there's a nice scent as well, isn't there?

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah, it has a delicate scent. You can see it's just it's called the orchid.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

Yeah, it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

It's just so dainty and delicate, really, really pretty. And then I think there's like inevitably when something's right in front of your nose, there's this tendency to ignore it.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

We all do it. And and you you look at what we haven't seen in Ireland at the moment, you think, okay, that's just so beautiful. You know, and you're driving along the road, and there's this huge big cherry in bloom, and you're slipping little bits off going, and that's incredibly beautiful. And actually, one of the fascinating things for me was uh because I never bought flowers for weddings for the first few years, then when we did, I was just so astonished by what it costs for a flower.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

And like more and more so as a price goes up. So like I think people would be astonished to know that just to buy one nice branch of cherry blossom could cost you like anywhere wholesale between like six to twenty euros.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Do you know what I mean? Like even a daffodil to buy wholesale, they they would be cheaper, would still cost you over probably over a euro. Like a hydrangea could cost you anywhere between six and eighteen euros wholesale.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

It's crazy when you when you have the capacity to to grow them, I guess. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

You know, they are when I drive by gardens and I see a spirea in flower, I think, oh my god, it's terrible actually, because it's made me start thinking in terms of almost real estate. I'm going, that's worth about like you know, five, six hundred.

SPEAKER_02 20:29

Um so soil is very important, and you've mentioned some some things that you do. You know, talked with your your neighbours dropping in uh cow manure, horse manure, yeah, uh and so on. And that's really important. You mentioned nettle uh fertiliser as well. Yeah. I I find that's really good at creating strong leaf, really, really healthy plants.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Incredibly good, yeah.

Best Plants For A Cut Garden

SPEAKER_02 20:53

So we have the soil kind of sorted. Um for somebody who's looking to create a cut garden at home, yeah, you know, whatever method they're using, just go through some of the you know the must-have flowers. Now, I obviously, you know, when when you're doing weddings and so on, you need to expand your you know, your varieties and so on. But for a kind of a basic list of you know Yeah for somebody at home.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

I think first of all, I would say choose what you love. It's amazing how many times I've given workshops on cult flowers. People say, Oh, well, you know, like um yeah, I mean I love really bright colours, but I I but they probably wouldn't be good in a cult flower um you know patch. And you're thinking, absolutely they would be. Like you pick what you love, what what sings to you, you know what I mean? And that's one of the great joys of cult flower growing, that you can tailor it absolutely to what you love. I mean, we grow a lot of stuff inevitably in in paler colours because we're dealing with weddings where not always, but often you the paler colours are more you know kind of usable.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Um, in terms of you know, sustainability and just ease of growing, I would also say there's a big move in. In cut flower growing towards more perennial shrubby content. And that's for very good reasons. There's a lot of energy and time and labor involved in producing annuals and biennials, or much shorter lived flowers. Now we still grow a lot of those as crops because we need them. So we, you know, I'm I've got pots and pots at the moment of like, you know, um kind of corncockle, white corn cockle, and you know, um, cosmos about to be sown, nicotine, scabius. We'd grow a lot of those, but I would say definitely for somebody who's starting off, like consider some perennial um um varieties, you know, that are gonna be really, really hardworking, like these shrubby varieties, like things like, for example, like um Philadelphus.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

Beautiful mock orange, scented, incredibly hardy, resilient shrub, really productive, loves our climate. Again, I would say definitely um daffodils, because they love the Irish climate and they're perennial, they're really, really resilient. I mean, you despite the delicacy of that little flower thalia, it will take a lot of cold and wind and rain. It will come back every year no matter what. Um, I would say also just other perennials that would really suit an Irish climate, things like flocks, which again is a really productive perennial, scented, loves a cool, moist soil. Um, I would think about things like on a shorter level, like not as long-lived, but really giving you know varieties that flower for a long period of time and last long in a vase. For example, sweet William.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Um, technique a biennial, more like a short-lived perennial, like again, a really good cottage garden favourite, really easily raised from seed. The flowers last for a very long time on the plant, they last incredibly long in a vase, like to the point where you're almost like, okay, we can go now.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

I need a change.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Yeah. And they're very deeply scented, you know. So Dianthus barbatus, they're they're absolutely delicious. Um, I would also think as well about the the different seasons. The inclination people have when they start off at Cold Flower Garden is to really it's really hard to be disciplined. You know, you're like in a sweet shop and you just see all your favorite chocolates there. Do you know what I mean? And yeah, you have to think, hey, you want to be able to span those seasons as much as you can. So, like if you're starting off with daffodils, that's a really good beginning because that's early in the season, you know, and think what would I partner them with? Maybe you could partner them with, say, Philadelphia, or I'm sorry, with forsythia, which is a really again a shrub that we tend to look down on. But actually, it's a beautiful, hardy, vigorous, kind of resilient, long-lived shrub that will really you know give without much care. And again, if you saw what it cost to buy forsidia stems, you would just consider it in a different way. And also yellow is extremely fashionable in um flower growing at the moment. So you can kick off with that. Um, I mean, I just don't think what we have. We would have after that, we would have things like GM, which is again a really giving perennial, and loads of the longer lasting kind of um sterile varieties go on for a long time, really pretty. Um, I love Canterbury Bells, which again are an amazing like cut flower. It's a biennial. I love the white one. There's something kind of delicate and kind of really kind of ethereal about it. Um again, you'd raise that from seeds soon in kind of late spring, early summer, and would flower for you the following year. Um I'm just trying to think then after that with so many stuff. And I'm an absolute lover of dahlias. And I would say, despite the fact they're a little bit fussy and demanding to grow, that they are such a generous plant and they keep on flowering and flowering if you get them the right conditions. So, like if you get your dahlia into flower by July with the right getting it the right conditions, and you mind it and you feed it, they will keep going until the first harsh frosts in kind of you know September, October, maybe November. You've got a plant that just pumps out blooms.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Um, I would definitely say sweet pea. Again, just really productive over a long period of time. It's a hardy animal. Um, it's best sown kind of in kind of you know late autumn, early winter, or in very, very kind of late winter, like around kind of January into February. But again, right conditions, really rich soil, plenty of moisture, you know, sunlight, and you will have plants that will just bloom, as long as you keep picking them, will bloom for weeks and weeks on end.

SPEAKER_02 26:05

Yeah, brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

Yeah, I love the way you're mentioning some like for City, for example. We I covered that on an episode a while ago of flowering shrubs that, in my opinion, are undervalued, underutilized, and maybe seen a little bit old fashioned, and definitely that's that's one that is kind of in some circles deemed old fashioned. But when you see it at the moment, it's amazing. Oh, it's unbelievable. Like and it and you would you'd be driving along and you it would catch your eye and blaze of yellow, like wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Okay, there it is.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

Yeah, and but definitely underutilized, and you know, Swede William is another one that's generally I think underutilized, and flocks is another one. So it's good, it's good that you're mentioning some of those.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

And they're they're great. And um, I think, yeah, I think we're all guilty of garden scenario and you know, fashion fads and trends come and go. And then there was such a focus on kind of perennial and grasses in recent years that I think a whole generation has kind of forgotten the garden worthiness of really good, vigorous, strong shrubs. And God, given the kind of way the Irish climate is going in terms of the extremes of of climate, and you know, we can go anywhere from like waterlogging to drought.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

Yeah, and very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Very quickly, and bounce and that's that's stressful for plants, and you you need plants that can take that in their stride with resilient, strong root systems. And so these kind of shrubby plants that we've tended to look down on are they just really giving in that way. You know, they they keep coming back, and and you know, they're they're not going to be knocked down by a by a wet winter.

Smaller Gardens Community Growing Trends

SPEAKER_02 27:33

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You meant you mentioned trends there, obviously in your in your garden writing and you know, with questions and so on that come in. Have you noticed changes, trends? Is there anything that's you know that's coming up for you a lot now in your in your writing side?

SPEAKER_01 27:48

I think funny if I was writing about it for a column coming up. I think one of the biggest things is the shrinking size of gardens. And that's a really kind of something with enormous significance for you know younger generations and and the generations coming after them. I think when you when you see the size um um stipulations now for you know being given to kind of you know county councils in terms of minimum sizes of gardens for like, you know, say three bedroom houses is it something like 50 to 70 square metres now? And you're just thinking like that's very small, and you think that's having a massive impact on the kind of um plants people can grow. I think what you're seeing actually is a whole generation also who can't afford housing and are in rented um uh accommodation, and that's having an enormous impact on the gardeners amongst them who would love to establish gardeners. So that's to me is really sad and really frustrating, you know, that access to land. And that goes back to flower farming as well. I mean, flower farming, you know, you need land for to be a good flower farm, you need a lot of land.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

And I think as what we're seeing happening you know, economically and politically at the moment, in terms of the consequences of the Gulf of Hormuz um and the impacts of that on the Irish economy, and how that's going to then impact on the easy transportation of goods that we take for granted.

unknown 29:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Like we're just gonna have to be so much more self-sufficient and more kind of um, you know, resourceful in what we produce. And cut flowers is gonna be one of those things, but then we need to focus on how do we uh uh access that land and where do we get it from, you know?

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Yeah, that's something that like uh obviously when you think about it, um I'm aware of it, but it wasn't something that was on my radar that the size of gardens is getting smaller, um and I suppose it is something that will definitely, you know, in years to come that will become more apparent. But you know, if you look at European gardens and things like uh you know balcony gardening, yeah, uh allotments, even to a certain extent, if if our garden size continues to shrink, then those type things will become more important because it'll be you know, often I go to Germany and when you're on the train you see the allotments along by the train tracks.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

And they're just a hive of activity, not just for growing food, but they're barbecuing, there's kind of a community thing going on.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

And if if the garden size sizes are shrinking, you know, that type of thing could become more and more relevant for I think I think you see, like certainly for me, from when I I would have first started writing, I first started writing for the Irish Times, um, and my husband used to take the photographs and I wrote, and we used to do this piece on this walled um kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park called Ashton, and the OPW had done a marvellous job of restoring it, and it was being managed by these really kind of great team of young OPW gardeners. So every week we would go in and we would write about what they were doing, and it was a very much kind of modeled along the lines of a traditional Victorian productive garden with an area, obviously extensive areas for food growing, but then also flower growing, which actually was interesting to me because it was one of the first times I'd seen cut flower borders, you know what I mean? Because they would have been a big thing back in the Victorian era. Um, but it was just it was it was fascinating to see it. And around that time, I think you saw the emergence then of the community garden movement in Ireland.

unknown 31:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

I mean, I remember not even knowing what a community garden was until I wrote this book with my husband called From the From the Ground Up, How Ireland is growing its own. And we met with community gardeners over in the west of Ireland, a garden that was being um helped to be run by Klaus Leidenberger. And it was kind of a hard idea to get your head around. But now community gardens, we like you are very mainstream. Yeah, they're they're in every little small town and village in the country, and that's fantastic. And I I think they're incredibly important for people who don't have access to to anywhere to grow, and yeah, they build a sense of community, they share skills, they also like preserve skills that would otherwise be lost. Yeah, um, I think the focus is probably more now on those than on allotments. I think in Ireland there there seems to be a move against individual allotments more towards these commonal growing spaces.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

Yeah. Community gardens and the community within gardening is something that struck me last week. As I say, I was doing a talk at Ratville Flower Cup.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

Yeah, they're lovely.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Yeah, lovely people. But there was, I don't know what there was, maybe 45, 50 people at it. Um so the talk was an hour or whatever, and then they they break for tea. But it was they were so I they meet every week, I think, or every two weeks. But they were so intently talking to each other about gardening.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

So when when when my talk was over, they all grouped up and it was amazing. Like it was real community. And I re I said to somebody that, you know, all our communities need more community. You know, yeah. Whether that's your sports club or your your gardening club or whatever it is, like we definitely disconnected a little bit as a society from each other over the last few years, and it was I just thought it was a lovely thing to see the way they were connected to one another.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

You saw that in the pandemic, actually, a lot of those gardening clubs really flourished online in the pandemic and built us as a community, and there were people were able to kind of you know connect through that. And um, yeah, like those kind of gardening clubs also they're fantastic in terms of they share plants, they often conserve old varieties that might get lost, otherwise, you know, yeah, you know, they they're they're just it's just a very generous attitude of mind generally amongst that their members, yeah.

Books Wedding Work And Dahlia Care

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was lovely. Um, you mentioned before we start to close off, you mentioned new book on the horizon, but maybe talk about some of your previous books.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

Um, I don't have any books. Actually, find like like writing a book is like you know, it's like giving birth to something, just a lot of work. I don't want to do that one again. Um so yeah, I just did one book before now with my husband, which was I said it was called From the Ground Up. Um and it was kind of uh it was we wrote it and photographed it shortly after we'd started that series on the on the mall garden in in Ashland and the Phoenix Park in Dublin. And we went around and we interviewed a really wide variety of kitchen gardeners. So, like like from a guy who grew food on the balcony in Dublin to um, you know, a community garden in the west of Ireland, you know, to Joy Larkam's plot down in West Cork, um, Madame McKeever, the Irish seeds producer down in Cork as well. So we were trying to kind of really give a great sense of what was going on around the country. And it was kind of around that time as well when Ireland was going through the whole financial crisis and you know, the kind of brought about you know that collapse in in 2008-2009. And there was that really emerging sense of community and of people trying new things and new ways of of growing food. Um, you wrote by Michael Kelly, GIY as well, which was kind of emerging at that time. Um, so yeah, that was nice. And the the book I'm writing at the moment, I'm I'm co-writing it and I was just asked to do it. It's very, very different. It's about Kells Bay um garden than in um Southwest Kerry, which is this really amazing. Um, anybody who doesn't know it, it's this kind of subtropical fern garden uh right on the edge of the Atlantic coast. Um, a little pocket of kind of yeah, amazingness where tree ferns, Australian tree ferns have naturalised and kind of self-spored everywhere. Yeah, all the kind of prosny of this um mothered tree fern that was planted in the Wall Garden back in the Victorian era um by its then owner, um a man with the amazing name of Roland Ponsonby Blenderhassett. Quite a name.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

Yeah, quite a name, that's right. Um that's an amazing and that's um several I don't know how many, but several several Chelsea um That's right.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

So so um um oh my god, his name's got it in my head.

SPEAKER_02 35:31

Billy Billy Alexander.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Billy Alexander. So Billy Alexander bought the property in in kind of 2005 and he's done this an amazing job against all the odds of restoring what was at that point a pretty um dilapidated old Victorian building and its gardens. Um he's poured a huge amount of time, energy, and love, and God, really like through a tough era, um, you know, when there wasn't much funding around or much money around, and it's yeah, it's just amazing. And um, Billy's done a series of exhibits at Chelsea. Um, he won kind of gold for his his exhibit last year, and he'll be exhibiting again um next year.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Yeah, brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Um yeah, so it's yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And and the the garden has a fascinating history, yeah. So it's it's it's a nice one to write. I'm writing it with um oh my brain. You'll come back to me in a second, um botanic gardens. Um Brendan Sayers, the orchid actor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

Brilliant, yeah, that that that's definitely a nice one. Um as we start to wind down, is there any kind of final tips you give to someone who wants to create their own their own cut flower garden at home?

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Um I I think for me, like I gotta say, I uh I love everything about gardening, but I would absolutely say to anybody who's never done it before, give seed propagation a chance. To me, it's the kind of beating heart and the magic of gardening. All it's just an amazing way to propagate your own plants really cheaply, large amounts of them. It gives you opportunity to you know grow different varieties you'll never find for sale in a garden centre. If you save your own seed, it there's a sustainability kind of plus there. Not always suitable for all varieties, but for a lot of them it is. And it like please don't have this idea in your head you have to have a glasshouse or you know a big propagation area. As I said before, you can do it relatively simply and you can produce huge quantities of plants very cheaply and very sustainably. Um, and one last tip I would say is definitely to use classmen um um seed compass, which I find absolutely amazing. So many people say to me, Oh, I did it and it was dreadful. And inevitably I find one of the biggest problems is people not using um good quality um seed compass. So use a good one, classman is a peat-free one, which I love as well.

SPEAKER_02 37:40

Yeah, I've I've tried I've tried that for the first time this year, and yeah, it's isn't it good? It is as nice as and it's as nice as everybody says it is. It's like beautiful feelings.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Results are good.

SPEAKER_02 37:51

Yeah, no, no, no, that's that's that's brilliant. Anything on the horizon over the next few weeks in terms of talks or anywhere that you're no, we're just loads of weddings.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Um yeah, so like for us as as like the what the winter season is quite a nice, kind of quieter time for us, and then our wedding season really kicks off kind of you know, we did it uh like we do a few weddings in spring, but it kind of kicks off properly, really properly from May. So from May right through to really December, we're busy with weddings, you know what I mean? But our busiest seasons would be yeah, May right through to kind of October. Well, yeah, it's just it's very busy, yeah. So it's a mad that juggle of getting stuff in the ground, you know, mining crops, prepping for weddings. It's lovely. It brings you all around the country. You see the most amazing venues, like many of them historical, like you're working there behind the scenes. Um, no, we just we enjoy it, but yeah, it's full on.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

Yeah, brilliant. Uh final question. The dayas that you're growing, do you leave them in the ground or do you dig?

SPEAKER_01 38:49

So if you'd asked me that question in Wicklow, I would have said we definitely lift them because it was a wet garden and it's much colder garden. We got harsh frosts and snow um in in winter time, so we we lift them, which was a laborious, tough job. It's hard. And you know, just getting them into under storage. And we used to store them in. Do you remember those awful daleks that they sold as kind of compass bins? They were like kind of like plastic bins, yeah. But we used to have those in a shed upturned with so the wider bit at the top, yeah. And we just put them all into that and throw some fleece over them, and that kept them perfectly okay. But here in Leash, we grow them in um um um a raised bed with the um shelter of a south-facing wall behind them. And like I said, the soil is much better drained, so we just mulch them in autumn, late autumn winter, we cover them over with some old branches and stuff, um you know, just anything like just take the harshness of any frost off them. Yeah, and then we keep a careful eye on them when they're emerging in spring around this time of year. They do need to be divided, I would say, daily say weaken vagor-wise after about three or four years. You need to divide those big meaty tubers up.

SPEAKER_02 39:56

Yeah, no, I'm a big fan of leaving them in the ground too, just purely from the point of view of uh yeah, it's it's it's not I don't like that job. I find it a bit too tedious.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Um they give so much wet that kills them, I think. It's the wet. It's not the cold, yeah. I think people like that's a really good thing for our gardeners to remember. Generally speaking, it's not cold in Ireland that kills plants, it's the the wet. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

And I find as well, you know, at the end of the season where you cut off the stems, obviously they're tubular like a straw.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

I I find that that you know that is a big flaw that people make is they leave that tubular thing just sitting up above the ground.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

To cut the water.

SPEAKER_02 40:32

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you're able to cap that some way, it it definitely helps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Any kind of mulch, like straw, old manure, like even just old cutting like material, like old branches, old twigs, if you pop it over it, it will make a difference. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

So it's been a really interesting chat. Yeah, we've kind of jumped around a few topics that we thought we might we we could talk for hours. It's lovely to hear definitely.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:56

Lovely to hear you mention it's some of the sort of underutilised or undervalued shrubs and and flowers out there. But uh, it's been a really interesting chat. Delighted to hear about your garden. Uh and thank you very much for coming on Master My Garden podcast.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

Well, thank you very much for asking me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Closing Thoughts And Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 41:12

So that's been this week's episode. A huge thanks to Fanilla for coming on. Um, yes, good really good tips there and some lovely selections of plants. Uh, I liked what she said in relation to you know choosing plants. You know, if there's a particular flower that you like at a certain time, then think what would pair with that and then grow those little windows, you know, for your cut flower garden. So, some as I say, some lovely underutilised plants in there and really good, you know, good uh consistent performers for cut flower garden. So get your pen out and and get started at it. And that's been this week's episode. Thanks for listening. Until the next time, happy gardening.