With warm and sunny days upon us, Buffalo gardeners have seen the light.

It’s the sunlight, of course. And, it may be more than they wanted, shining into areas where trees once stood and through spaces where limbs were lost during the October storm.

Given the increased, sometimes daylong sunshine, gardens are wide open for something new – and one possibility is the old-fashioned cutting garden.

And, what, you may wonder, is a cutting garden?

For starters, it’s not an ornamental garden, where plants are intentionally and creatively placed to provide a pleasing display of color, shape and texture, according to gardening books. Though that’s the plan on paper, gardens notoriously take on a life of their own, but that’s another story.

The cutting garden, by contrast, isn’t meant for showing off, but for cutting down – bloom by beautiful bloom. Think of it as a “cut and color” garden.

At one time, it was the custom for a lady of leisure to stroll through such a garden, a basket on her arm, to choose the best blooms for that evening’s dinner party. Think of period movie pieces that show such afternoon strolls the most tedious thing a young maiden would do that day.

A cutting garden has a different look because it’s set up in rows of the same plants, with spaces left between, so the gardener can get in to weed, deadhead, water and, ultimately, harvest.

It’s planted each year with as many colorful annuals as can be managed, along with faithful perennials, to create bouquets for the house or the entire neighborhood. Because this is a workhorse of a garden – with design secondary to production – it’s often been relegated to an out of the way space, a back lot. The other thing about a cutting garden is that if you aren’t paying attention to aesthetics, it’s just fine to put the orange Calendula next to the deep rose Nicotiana without getting a rolled-eye response.

Today’s cutting garden, most likely, is tended by hard-working people such as Linda and Denis Funseth of Elma, who rototill, dig in compost and do whatever it takes to turn the 30-by-30 foot plot next to their driveway into a late summer paradise. It started with his interest in growing vegetables, which continues on a smaller scale.

“Every so often, she’d ask for another row,” he said. “I gave it to her after I realized it was all work.”

For 20 years, these retired educators have maintained a flourishing garden, much of it produced from seeds they collected the previous year or purloined from others’ gardens.

She won’t start this year’s effort for a couple of weeks, she said, no matter how tempting the weather gets.

“I don’t plant until May 31,” said Funseth, vice president of the Holland Garden Club. “My grandfather always said you shouldn’t plant until Memorial Day. And I never start seeds inside. That’s a lot of work.”

Come the end of the month, she’ll sprinkle seeds into the furrows they’ve created. After the seeds are in, she walks down each row, one foot right in front of the other, copying the tamping technique she learned from her mother.

Then, she waits, weeding and watering as she watches the shoots emerge.

“I have to wait until August or September to really enjoy the garden,” she said. “You have to be patient, but I’d rather do that and just plant seeds. A lot of my friends go out and buy the plants so they can enjoy them all summer.”

Her reward, when it comes, is an astounding display of cosmos, zinnias, nasturtiums, a glorious melange of color that ends up in bouquets for church, in salads and as edible blossoms on cakes and brownies.

Roxanne McCoy, who has given talks on cutting gardens, said the cutting garden requires exactly what the vegetable garden does: full sun and soil amended with organic matter. Early in the season, she fertilizes with a 5-10-5 fertilizer, and she puts in plants of different sizes, texture and timing so something is always in bloom.

Once blooms are present, she suggests vigorous and regular cutting.

“The more annuals you pick, the more they produce,” said McCoy, who owns Lilies of the Field in West Falls, a cut flower farm. “They are programmed to reproduce. If you cut off the future seed source, it puts out more. Its whole purpose is to produce seeds for the next year.”

Those who maintain cutting gardens can even get double crops, she said. One plan would be to plant early bloomers such as pansies, which can be removed when they get leggy and summer weary, and replaced with zinnias.

Perennials such as coneflowers, black-eyed susans and coreopsis, are often included in the cutting garden, but it’s also the perfect place to experiment with an unproven plants that catch your eye during the frequent spring buying trips.

Desirable flowers for a cutting garden are those with tall, sturdy stems, that bloom enthusiastically, that are extravagantly colored, and have a long vase life, at least five days.

These veterans say it’s not necessary to buy plants — that seeds will do just as well — to produce such results.

“I’m real cheap,” said Mc- Coy. “I can’t imagine buying a lot of plants, although I know everybody does. I cannot imagine buying a sunflower plant. They’re so easy to grow from seed.”

Instead, she suggests na- ture’s way: collecting seeds in the fall when they are fully formed and browned up, but before they fall to the ground. She stores the seed heads in a paper bag (not plastic because seeds are likely to mold) and shakes them out in a few months. The following spring, she starts some of them indoors, a finicky process.

“I have my Lisianthus in the basement, under a timer light,” she said, “and I only have to check it every three days.”

McCoy disregards the nearly universal practice of waiting until the danger of frost has passed before planting seeds.

“I plant earlier than most, by the first week of May,” she said. “We’ll almost certainly have a frost after that and if it gets too wet, they’ll rot. But I take chances. I actually have lost precious, precious little. And every year I get a little bolder.”

In fact, she’s even sprinkled annual poppy seeds right onto the last snow, she said.

“There’s another thing that’s sort of new,” she said, “Some serious gardeners have sprinkled seed from perennials onto a pot of potting soil in January and put it outside in the snow.”

McCoy admits that 100 percent germination can’t be expected from the system, but that never happens anyway.

“A fresh pack of seed will give you 89 percent germination, with 72 percent the following year,” she said, adding that most seeds last up to two or three years.

“If I’m just doing something for myself, I’d throw anything into the ground,” she said.

“If you’re doing a cutting garden, remember that it’s not for looking good outside,” said McCoy. “It’s to produce flowers that look good in vases, in the house.”

pvoell@buffnews.com. source : www.buffalonews.com