6 Must Have Flowers for the Small Scale Flower Farm

When it comes to choosing varieties for a small scale flower farm, there are a plethora of flowers that you can of course grow.

But the question that you may have (as I did) was what are some of the best flower varieties to grow?

Of course as we’ve discussed in the previous posts, some of the traits that we’re looking for in flower varieties for the small scale flower farm include

Cut-and-come again varieties
Long harvest window
Long bloom period
Versatility when it comes to using in designs
Bringing something special - whimsy, texture, etc.

While I can’t profess to know your exact circumstances and needs of your flower farm, these are some of the flowers that we’ve found have adapted to growing well in small spaces and also being able to work into the small scale flower farm’s business model.

We’ve grown plenty of flower varieties, but have found that these time and time again have worked well into the small scale model, and I’ve also included some of our favorite cultivars or varieties as well.

Violas and Pansies

If you’ve never had the pleasure of working with violas and pansies as a floral designer, then you’re in for a treat! While most people envision violas as the brightly and bold-colored annuals growing in plastic pots and planters, violas can make for a wonderful cut flower.

It takes a bit of work - you need to grow them tightly and ideally overwinter them so that they can grow large and strong root systems to support tall and large stems in the spring. As the days get longer and warmer, you’ll find that the violas start to get taller and leggier- which usually would be unfavorable with the bedding plant function that they’re designated for, but in our case are perfectly suited for our purposes.

Violas and pansies add such character to arrangements. They’re that nice little pop of color and character that is at first a surprise, then delight at the recognition of their little colorful faces .

My favorite hands-down are the ‘Frizzle Sizzle’ series. Blooming on robust long stems and with dark-faced centers, my favorite feature about them are the ruffled edges of their petals that are similar to the edges of a lisianthus or a Spencer sweet pea - adding a wonderfully elegant texture and ruffle to arrangements.

If you’re wanting smaller blooms, there are plenty of beautiful violas that can add interest and beauty to your arrangements. I love the variety ‘Tiger Eye Red’ that are a lovely rust-colored viola with dark black veins coming across the petals in tiger-like stripes. There’s also the variety ‘Brush Strokes’ that is composed of a variety of gold, deep eggplant, chocolate and pale creme in all combinations of bicolor, picotee, splashed, spotted and streaks across their petals.

I aim to try and get stems to at least 12” before I start cutting from them. When kept well watered and fed and supported, they’ll continue to produce blooms for quite a while (until it gets too hot and they start to peter out). Strip the lower stems of leaves (being careful not to break the stem) and they will last for a week or more. I usually also try and harvest more in a spray, with multiple buds and flowers on a single stem.

Icelandic poppies

While ranunculus and anemones are the usual heroes of spring for many people, there are some downsides to them. For us, our climate isn’t quite warm enough for us to be able to overwinter them consistently - we tend to lose a lot without planting under cover, but more problematic is the fact that our springs get hot prematurely and our window of blooming and harvest hardly make them worth it.

Icelandic poppies on the other hand, are cold hardy down to around -5 F (about 20 F colder than anemones and ranunculus) and are not quite as affected by hotter springs (in fact, I swear it makes them more productive) and bloom for far longer and more prolifically than ranunculus and anemones.

Crinkled, transparent tissue-paper-like petals on furry stems with bright green centers make for quite an iconic flower, and their colors (usually in bright scarlet red, deep orange, bright lemon yellow, deep pink and pure white) work well for just about any arrangement. There has also been some progress in breeding paler, muted colors of pale peach, apricot, blush, gold and buttercream such as with the ‘Meadow Pastels’ variety.

There are also the gigantic ‘Colibri’ varieties whose flowers can reach a good 4” across that while not as prolific as the smaller varieties are much more impressive, growing on gigantic thick stems that make for some pretty impressive specimens (and can command a much higher price and greater attention from customers!)

Icelandic poppies are some of the most prolific flowers we grow actually. From a single planting, they can bloom for almost a full eight weeks (or more depending on the weather) here on long and wiry stems, and when cut and harvested properly have almost a week’s vase life. Seriously, these plants just pump out the blooms. Even if you only grew Icelandic poppies for your entire spring crop, you could do quite well for yourself

Phlox

Phlox is quite a fabulous little flower. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much - it honestly looks kind of weedy, and on spindly long stems that sport a few rather insignificant looking flowers at the top. And a single stem is almost hardly worth noting, disappearing into any arrangement or bouquet that it is tucked into.

However, while these qualities may seem to be a minus, they are actually what makes them such a valuable flower. Phlox are like the supporting actors and actresses - never the star, but they fully support the other flowers and materials in an arrangement.

Phlox plays the role of complimentary material and contrasting material. Their little flat flowers are quite different from other flowers that tend to be more button-shaped (such as calendula and zinnias) or tubular (such as snapdragons or nicotiana) or ruffled (such as ranunculus and roses)- a nice contrast from those other flower textures. Their longer, curling and twining stems are a marked difference from the general straight and stiff stems of other floral materials (again, another contrast in terms of form and shape) and their scale as a flower is quite small, adding daintiness and variety in terms of scale to you arrangement (again, great contrast).

In terms of being complimentary, phlox does very well with a wide variety of colors and shades of the muted, neutral tones. ‘Creme Brulee’, ‘Cherry Caramel’ ‘Isabellina’ and frankly any of the lightly colored varieties combine well with other soft colors and are a must-have for wedding and design work due to their colors. Their form allows them to tuck and weave in and amongst other flowers - perfect as a complimentary filler - and it also allows them to cascade and swirl around the edges of arrangements and bouquets as well.

As plants, they are a bit tricky. You want to plant them closely to encourage their stems to grow upwards (the crowding will help to increase their stem length) but that works well for being a tiny flower farmer, since we are all about intensive planting of course (I plant three to four plants at 6” intervals) and you can pack a lot of plants into a bed this way.

You can get longer stems either one of two ways - pinch out the center until the offshoots grow tall enough to harvest from, or you can wait until the central stem gets nice and tall (pinching off the buds to encourage taller growth) and then harvest the center stem and allow the offshoots to grow longer. Either way works - I’ve tried both and I prefer the second (so I can get nice and long usable stems as soon as possible). Later in the season they will start naturally getting longer and more rangy on their own, which is where the wild and tumbling stems and shapes start forming.

I love to include phlox into bouquets - they add a lovely airy elegant dimension to any bouquet they are part of as well as a lovely sweet and sugary scent. I particularly like how the stems bounce and sway when you move the bouquet - a very important dimension to consider.

Cosmos

Cosmos are honestly one of the easiest flowers to grow and are so prolific that it can be hard to keep up with harvesting some times. They grow almost anywhere, can be direct sown, and even beginning gardeners can be quite successful with them.

So if they are so easy and common, why grow them?

Well, not all cosmos are created equal. Personally I prefer the more unusual varieties - varieties that have fluted or ruffled edges like the ‘Cupcakes’ and ‘Double Click’ series, or the large tetraploid varieties like ‘Afternoon White’ or ‘Versailles Flush’ that have nice thick stems that are perfect for arranging with, or even the unusual colors like ‘Kiiro’, ‘Apricot Lemonade’ and ‘Apricotta’. These unusual varieties don’t look like your garden-variety cosmos - they are different enough to where they look almost like a completely different flower when utilized in an arrangement or bouquet.

Cosmos are so vigorous in their growth and prolific with their blooming that I would be remiss in not growing them. Even a very small patch can produce a prodigious amount of blooms over the season that can be utilized in just about everything. You have to make sure that you’re staying on top of harvesting them and keeping them from going to seed, but if you can keep up with them they are one of the most prolific flowers per square foot.

Cosmos can be used as a large focal flower, but I find they are much better when used as a supporting element to other flowers (such as roses, dahlias or zinnias) or as an airy stem floating out of a bowl or trailing off a bouquet. Especially for some of the smaller flowering varieties like ‘Xanthos’ or ‘Apricot Lemonade’ they are very easy to tuck and weave among other flowers in arrangements.

Rare zinnias

Zinnia ‘Kokoro Garden Mix’ (I just made that up - the mix technically doesn’t exist - yet)

Again like cosmos, zinnias are a dime a dozen. The workhorse of flower farmers, gardeners and landscapers for decades, the tried-and-true ‘Benary Giants’ and ‘Oklahoma’ series have been grown for years as dependable varieties. And they are quite prolific and sturdy and impressive flowers that are cut-and-come again in nature, so it’s no surprise that they are so popular with growers.

However, I think that a lot of people are not into zinnias because they are so common. Similar to cosmos, people are less inclined to feel that a flower they’ve seen in their garden or in a planting somewhere is valuable enough to be included into an arrangement or bouquet.

However in recent years, there have been some advances in breeding to where zinnias have started popping up in gorgeous, different colors - peach, pale lilac, dusty rose, buttercream and ivory and all the delicious colors that blend well with other gorgeous flowers and fitting well into other wedding flowers.

These are what I refer to as the ‘rare’ varieties of zinnias that you’re not going to find readily unless you know a dedicated flower farmer. The ‘Queen’ series (including ‘Lime Red’, ‘Lime with Blush’, ‘Lime Orange’, and ‘Lime Peach’) are soft, muted, hazy toned flowers that blend well with other soft colors. Then there are the ‘Zinderella’ and ‘Cresto’ series that bloom in light peach, cream and lilac colors (as well as coming in tiny one-inch blooms that are more diminutive and less intrusive) that are so delicate and adorable, perfect for wedding work and bridal bouquets.

Then there are the even more rare zinnia varieties that are small scale, single-grower operations that have been hand-picked and bred on a teeny tiny scale - just the handiwork of a single person obsessed with zinnias. These include the work of Kori from Dawn Creek Farm, Tiffany of Blomma Flower Farm, and of course Erin of Floret Flower Farm that are breeding varieties that are in the most gorgeous pale tones of ivory, linen, peach, apricot, melon, buttercream, blush, lilac and silvery white.

We started saving seed for certain colors of small-flowering zinnias a while back to select for these same muted pastels, and while not necessarily as impressive as the large flowering varieties of other breeders, the smaller branching varieties are more prolific and combine easily into arrangements and bouquets and are so uniquely colored most people don’t think they are zinnias upon first inspection.

These rare zinnias are a completely different breed - something unique that you won’t find for sale at a grocery store, floral wholesaler or traditional floral shop. It’s one of the reasons why these breeders have been so focused on selecting for these colors - to give a new product for local growers and flower farmers to grow that isn’t offered anywhere else in the world.

In fact, I can imagine that you could change the entire world by growing these rare zinnias. For the months that they are in season, collective groups of small growers with these zinnias could change the entire demand for locally grown flowers by becoming the main source for these unique and beautiful flowers.

Single and anemone-type dahlias

As wonderfully spectacular the billowy dinnerplate dahlias are, they can be a bit limiting. If you’re doing smaller arrangements for example, a dinnerplate dahlia may be a bit overwhelming in scale. Large dahlias also don’t produce as quickly or readily as the smaller varieties, so you end up with fewer blooms per plant.

And while the smaller ball and pompon and waterlily and informal-type dahlias are more productive, there’s also the other alternative of growing dahlias from seed. Although it’s kind of a crapshoot as far as what you’ll get (dahlias are octoploid, meaning they have a large number of chromosomes to play around with in order to create their form and color and size and shape) there’s a good chance that you’ll get a large amount of pretty dahlias from seed.

Some people don’t like the less full dahlias - and I understand, since they don’t last nearly as long as the dahlias that have many petals. The reason is because their pistil and stamens are exposed and are much more readily accessed by bees and pollinators, so they are quickly pollinated and will have their petals shatter as a result.

However, when picked at the right time (just before blooming) and conditioned well, the single and anemone-type dahlias are gorgeous flowers that add a touch of elegance and character to any arrangement they are part of.

We’ve grown and developed our own mixes over the years, roguing out the ones that don’t do as well or pop up in the colors that we don’t want, and continue to refine the mixes to select for the cream, peach, apricot and soft rose colors that we utilize in our designs.

And although each individual bloom is not quite as impressive and breathtaking as a bonafide hybridized dahlia variety, they make up for it in numbers. Single-flowering dahlias tend to be much more vigorous than the other varieties, so you can cut quite a few stems from each plant.

The good news is that if you do grow a variety that you particularly like, you can of course save the tubers and propagate them later on.

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I hope that you’ve found this useful in your small scale flower farming endeavors! If you’re interested in reading more about small scale flower farming, you might find some of these articles useful;

Why We Decided to Downsize Our Flower Farm

A Letter to Flower Farmers Growing in Small Spaces

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Small Scale Flower Farming