Best flowers for quick and easy vases (2024 edition)
Pretty but look how many stems
Much bigger-necked vase, far fewer stems
When I was growing cut flowers for the bar last year, I was pretty focused on cut-and-come-again annuals for volume. So loads of nigella and cornflowers and ammi and sweet peas. And they do all produce loads of stems, but this year I’ve realised you need an awful lot to fill a big vase, and picking and conditioning them is time-consuming and actually not much fun. Cornflowers are especially annoying, with their easily-bent stems that need to be carefully de-leafed. And that’s before you even consider the time and effort involved in growing them from seed.
This year, I’ve realised there are other considerations apart from sheer volume. Some flowers (and they’re mostly not annuals), offer the brilliant advantage of arranging themselves as mini posies even before they’re picked, so putting them together creates a full-looking bouquet with half or even a quarter of the number of stems (and an equivalent saving in time). When you’re doing a couple of vases a week, usually in a rush, this is quite the boon. Plus the benefit of perennials and shrubs is they just appear every year - not effort or outlay required.
Here are my current top 5:
Lady’s Mantle: I’ve never been hugely drawn to this for the garden because it’s so hardy and low-maintenance that it’s often used in municipal planting and I’m not really going for the council car park look. But actually it’s a very pretty little lime green flower and sprays of it in the vase are a brilliant filler - better with a lot of summer flowers than heavy foliage.
Geranium ‘Azure Skies’: This has been a revelation this year - so much nicer than the Geranium ‘Nodosum’ I have everywhere. For one it is a much deeper blue-violet and the flowers are semi-double, and for another there’s much less foliage and what leaves there are are dark and pretty and altogether nicer. The stems are also much taller, thicker and branched, so it’s perfect for cutting - sturdy but also airy at the same time.
Spray roses: The one I’ve got is called ‘Mindgames’ and it’s streaked pink and white as though the petals have been painted. I never used to use cut roses because I thought they didn’t last very well but these have been fine for at least a week in the vase. So I’m on a mission to get more little roses now - both for the flowers and, hopefully, for sprays of tiny hips come autumn.
Astrantia: The first time I saw these, in someone else’s garden, I couldn’t believe how beautiful they were. But you get used to things, don’t you, and the novelty wears off and you stop seeing them in the same way after a while. That’s what happened with astrantia for me. But the flowers are incredible starbursts and they last literally weeks in water - seeing them cut has made me appreciate them again.
Mock Orange: Not only do the flowers smell incredible, but they’re arranged so perfectly on little stems that shoot out from the main branches. The flowers are quite tropical-looking I think (the cultivar I have is ‘Belle Etoile’). Not the best of this selection for vase life, but not bad for a woody stem.