Basil is one of the summer workhorses in our cutting garden. No other foliage we’ve tried has been so easy, so spectacular and so versatile. It goes great mixed with pretty much anything, holds up for a week in the vase, has that vertical form that is so hard to find, and of course the wonderful scent that is both exotic and yet comforting at the same time.

    I had always included flowering basil in the jam-jar arrangements I would sometimes make growing up, cramming a fistful of flowers from the garden with no design sense or order. Herbs had always felt like a natural addition to floral arrangements for me ever since seeing Gayla Trail’s handful of mint in a bouquet on You Grow Girl back circa 2008, so the addition of basil to bouquets had always been a thought.

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Daucus, also commonly called Chocolate Lace Flower, Chocolate Flower, Chocolate Queen Anne’s Lace, came onto the scene a few years back and took the florist and flower growing world by storm.

The umbellifer heads floating like clouds on strong long stems are such a beautiful sight. The variation in color runs from a dark burgundy to light cocoa to a bright white and changes as the flower ages. Even after the bloom is finished, the seed heads are this awesome weird curly magical structure that looks like some sort of chair a tiny fairy might sit on.

Despite looking like a color variant of Ammi, it is only distantly related to the Ammi majus and is actually a variety of Queen Anne’s Lace (the wild carrot that is endemic to the UK). It grows fairly quick - blooming in 65 days from seed - and from my experience blooms for a much longer period than Ammi.

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The first flower that I ever grew from seed were bachelor buttons.

It was the first spring at the house I was renting, and had received permission to start a small garden there. I had done some research as far as easy seeds to start, and had purchased a packet of bachelor buttons.

It seemed strange that the weird little grey seeds with their little hair-like tufts at the end would ever become really anything, but I planted them into a little bit of potting mix and waited for spring to come.

The seeds sprouted quickly, and soon sent up strappy silvery-grey leaves. I was a bit surprised at how easy they were - I had tried seeds in the past for vegetables, but never had started flower seeds before. The seedlings were incredibly vigorous, outgrowing their container in a few short weeks before getting planted outside.

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Snapdragons aren’t necessarily one of the flowers that I first fell in love with as a grower. They were kind of “meh.” I thought of them as mostly bedraggled bedding plants that never really looked great at any point, although I was fascinated by the small snapdragon that managed to struggle and overwinter three years in a row.

    In addition, snapdragons were endemic in all of the very standard Teleflora designs, especially in the “Hospital Dolly Yellow” as Sarah Raven describes it. Boring, standard, and overused, there was nothing that I loved about snapdragons.

    That was, until I saw some photos of snapdragons in farmers fields. We don’t have too many of those vertical spires available to us - digitalis, veronicas, verbascums, eremerus are the only ones aside from snapdragons I can think of. A row of snapdragons standing upright at attention is something to behold.

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Icelandic poppies. Their papery translucent petals are the stuff dreams are made of. Like a crushed silk dress that slowly unfurls, there is something so romantic and yet exciting about their delicate petals.

They were, also for three years, my nemesis. For three years, I've tried to germinate thousands of seeds, and every single time, I have failed. Not a single flower to show for my attempts, I had to purchase my plants in.

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