Cut-Flower Corner: Blooms for the Kitchen Table
It started, as most daft ideas in this family do, with a jam jar. Iris came in from next door's plot last week clutching a bunch of sweet peas she'd been given by old Pat, three doors down from us on the allotment, and stuck them straight in a jam jar in the middle of the kitchen table without so much as asking. Within about four minutes the whole kitchen smelled like a wedding, Sara had gone all misty-eyed over her tea, and I sat there looking at them thinking, hang on a minute, what exactly do WE grow for the vase? And the honest answer, after thirty-odd years of allotmenteering, is not a lot. Runner beans don't look much in a jug. Nobody's ever asked for a nice bunch of parsnips for their birthday. That was the moment it landed on me. We grow food beautifully. We grow it organised, we grow it chemical-free, we grow it in a rotation I could recite in my sleep. But flowers, proper cut flowers, the kind you snip and carry indoors and plonk in the middle of the table ...
