‘I’m not a gardener,’ declares Rachel Golding Barrett. ‘I don’t have a garden.’ Gazing over her cut-flower field, I’m not so sure. True, there aren’t the usual borders but it’s every bit as colourful as any conventional garden.
Pure white dahlias gleam in the early morning sun.
Long racemes of biscuit-coloured amaranthus sway gently in the breeze and clusters of dusky pink roses scent the air.
Rachel set up The Tetbury Flower Company four years ago and has already won a two golds and two silver-gilt medals at RHS Badminton, Malvern, Chelsea and Hampton Court.
Based in the village of Sopworth near Westonbirt, she grows flowers in a rented field next to her home.
Long, rectangular beds, covered in weed-suppressing membrane to combat bindweed, are planted in blocks with several of each variety of plant. Every bed has been heavily mulched over several years with soil improver, mushroom compost and organic horse manure as the soil is poor – a thin layer over Cotswold brash and then heavy clay.
Rachel specialises in tulips and dahlias, along with what she describes as ‘fillers and foliage’. These are sold as bouquets or buckets of flowers, either from her site or local farm shops, and sent to event florists.
Pick-your-own events are particularly popular. The tulip event started due to necessity when a warm spring last year brought all the flowers out at once.
‘There was no way I could harvest 10,000 in three-and-a-half weeks or sell them,’ she says. ‘We opened pick-your-own tulips, which went down a storm.’
Later in the season, there is foliage as well as flowers for visitors to gather, including dark-leaved physocarpus, along with phlox and veronicastrum. Dahlias and roses are among the most popular blooms.
‘People cut the big structural stuff that they would never dream of cutting in their garden,’ says Rachel, who is a member of the Flowers From the Farm trade association.
‘We don’t count the stems, and they can stuff the bucket. They can go home with a unique, beautiful bucket of flowers that they can’t get anywhere else.’
Indeed, the whole business is based on providing something a bit different – anything that can be found on a garage forecourt is banned. So, there is no eucalyptus or carnations, and antirrhinums are shunned not only because lots of people are growing them but also because Rachel believes it’s difficult to improve on Dutch imports.
‘I want to say: “Buy this one because it’s better, it’s scented, it’s got more movement, it’s in a colour you can’t get from the Dutch”,’ she explains. ‘We’re going for things that cannot be imported or things that you cannot find in a wholesaler.’
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Dahlias, she says, rarely import well as they bruise easily, while roses don’t have the scent and looseness of English roses but are stiff and straight stemmed. She grows several multi-headed varieties, including Rosa Fruity Parfuma (‘Korgehaque’), which lives up to its name with a lovely perfume.
Among the tulips, she favours the more unusual, novelty varieties rather than those such as ‘Purple Flag’, which is a supermarket staple. The season begins with ‘Exotic Emperor’ and ends with ‘Menton’ while ‘Finola’ is among the most popular.
With so many bulbs to plant, Rachel and her part-time assistant, Izzy Foord-Warren, speed the process up by laying bulbs down on the beds and covering them with compost and chipped bark rather than digging holes. That way, they can plant 10,000 in two days.
Structure, form and colour dictate her choice of dahlias with many of them waterlily or decorative varieties, including ‘Twiggy’ and ‘Evanah’. Large dahlias in bold colours that are often found on show benches are avoided as are single dahlias as they will drop their petals once pollinated so have a short vase life.
The colours change with the season. Pinks and white are popular in late summer but this switches to oranges and dark purples as autumn kicks in.
‘People don’t want pink flowers in the autumn. They want autumnal colours – particularly as we get to the end of September,’ she says. ‘They want Bonfire Night, Halloween, pumpkin colours.’
This year, she has grown 100 different varieties, imported as tubers from Holland and grown on to ensure they are disease-free and have been correctly labelled – mix-ups with dahlias are a common problem.
They are planted in the cut-flower field in blocks of 30, 15 or six, and also provide rooted cuttings that she sells as pot plants at shows, plant fairs and online.
In future, she plans to produce all the plants from her own stock – ‘I want to be 100 per cent British.’
The varieties will increase as she has been breeding small garden dahlias for the past 11 years – ‘The flower farm allows me to indulge my passion for breeding,’ she laughs.
Among those she has raised are ‘Cotswold Salmon’, a beautiful copper-pink dahlia that, unlike many of the cutting dahlias, doesn’t need much space and so will fit neatly into a border or even a container.
‘You can have a pot on your balcony and “Cotswold Salmon” will throw out 20 stems a week if you cut it properly.’
That means cutting low on a stem, above a leaf node, taking both flowers and buds off. The plant will then produce more stems. Rachel cuts around 1,000 stems a week during the season and can fill a bucket in minutes.
Her year begins though with sweet peas – around 1,000 pots are produced from seeds sown in autumn and January.
Sowing annuals begins in February although she has cut back this year to give more emphasis on perennials, such as Verbena bonariensis, echinacea and gaura.
Among those annuals that are still grown are daucus, malope, and amaranthus, which are brought on in a polytunnel. The first crop to be picked is daffodils with many going for funeral flowers. Sending the blooms out ‘on the bulb’ means families can plant them after the service.
Dahlias are potted up in March, ready to take cuttings and then it’s tulip time before ranunculus flower in May, followed by the roses, perennials and dahlias.
Slotted in are taking dahlia cuttings and sowing hardy annuals with wreath workshops in December. It’s little wonder that Rachel, who worked for many years as a marketing consultant for banks and firms including Yellow Pages, has everything planned from what jobs have to be done each week throughout the year to how many stems have been ordered of each flower.
She is ruthless about what she grows, walking the field at the end of the season to decide what was cut and what didn’t sell or was too time-consuming to harvest. To cut down on the workload, the dahlias are not lifted but left in the field with a heavy, protective mulch.
The workload is relentless but enjoyable: ‘I love the challenge but the biggest thing I love is the reaction when people walk in and see the flowers.’.
thetetburyflowercompany.co.uk
@thechattygardener
@The Chatty Gardener
@thechattygardener.bsky.social
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