Enjoy the beauty of flowers grown for cutting at cut flower specialists Kilcoan Gardens, on the peninsula of Islandmagee in Co. Antrim, where this month you can join in with a guided walk through their beautiful cutting garden and take home lots of tips about how to create and maintain your own cut flower patch using flowers adapted to the Irish climate.
A dedicated patch is a great way to bring the beauty of the garden indoors without robbing flowers from your back garden display. You can raise lots of hardy annuals from seed to provide a cheap but cheerful blaze of colour all summer. Some of the best include sweet peas, pot marigolds, cornflowers, cosmos, larkspur and baby's breath (Gypsophila). Add perennials like pinks and peonies, rudbeckias for later in the year, plus a row or two of dahlias - you'll find a huge variety of tubers on sale right now in our garden centre, from scarlet 'Bishop of Llandaff' to the tangerine pompom flowers of 'David Howard'. Keep well watered and you'll be picking huge bunches for months at a fraction of what you'd pay for shop-bought.
Tours of Kilcoan Gardens take place on Saturday 12 April: for more details visit www.kilcoangardens.com.
