For the plate - or the vase?

Tulips are wonderful cutting flowers. Grow lots! — Claire Gribbin/Flickr

There are plenty of gardeners raising fruits and vegetables who delight in putting food on the table – especially now when Victory Gardens are making a comeback.

I’d just as soon make it flowers.

Living in the heart of pick-your-own country and abundantly served by roadside produce stands, I don’t have to go far to support my local farmer. As a matter of fact, I know my local farmer by name. Except for the essential backyard tomato, I’m content to let the pros provide the edibles.

Instead, I aim to have flowers on the table — and the mantel, the window sills and countertops — all through the season. Ordinarily, I achieve this worthy goal without a problem, but sometimes, my plan is shot down by circumstances beyond my control.

The first big fix for my vases is generally to be found among the daffodils, now in bloom. Then I look to the beds of tulips I grow expressly for early cutting.

Since one of my ruling maxims is “Nothing exceeds like excess,” you won’t be surprised to learn that the tulips don’t go in by the dozens, but rather number in the low hundreds. I feel that 275 tulips in species blooming from early April through late May is just barely enough so I needn’t denude the garden to provide for the house.

It’s no small thing to plant all these bulbs, but I nestle them wholesale into trenches and, by now, swing through this annual chore on automatic pilot. While I’m down on my knees in the dirt, I relish the thought of those giant Emperor tulips, classic Darwins and elegant Le Feber hybrids — three favorites selected after years of trial and error.

Imagine my heartbreak one spring when I discovered that, for the first time ever, deer had broken into my fenced garden where the tulips live their sheltered lives and eaten the nascent shoots to the ground. And I do mean just about all of them: Planted, 275; harvested, 9. Nine! It’s enough to make a gardener weep.

The peony, a lovely powderpuff of a flower. —- julie/Flickr

Spring proceeds with blossoms I don’t often cut because they are so short-lived in the vase — the columbines and bleeding hearts, woodland hyacinths and basket-of-gold, the pansies and the Virginia bluebells. I go visit them in the out-of-doors while I await the next big thing.

That would be the lilacs, the fragrant, voluptuous and abundant lilacs, ripe in May for picking. Where once I rued the brevity of their vase-life, I now have learned the secret to keeping them fresh-looking for five days to a week.

When you cut the stems, immediately remove all of the foliage. If you don’t, the leaves greedily suck up water, leaving the flower trusses thirsty and soon wilted. I read this tip somewhere and as far as I’m concerned, it’s right up there with unraveling the secrets of space flight or the mystery of socks gone missing in the wash.

When the lilacs have faded, the peonies start to come in. I find that they are not all good keepers in the vase, and of course, there is the problem of ants that hide in the folds of their many petals.

I generally leave them outside for a while after I cut them to allow the ants to abandon ship. When I really have time on my hands, I immerse the peonies in a bucket of water, which encourages the ants to swim for shore. This is better than watching the little buggers run for their lives across my dining table — so tacky.

Ahead of heavy rains, I cut lavishly from the current bloomers lest they become waterlogged and wind up face down in the dirt. My `Princess Margaret,' `Angel Cheeks' and `Marshmallow Tart' peonies are things of exquisite beauty, each powderpuff blossom so large, you'd need two hands to hold it; each petal so silken and luminous, you'd need a van Huysum to paint it.

The poet Mary Oliver commends the peonies for "their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling," and I know in my gardener's bones what she means. Picture a blush-pink peony and listen as the poet speaks:

``. . . the flowers bend their bright bodies,

and tip their fragrance to the air,

their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

gladly and lightly,

and there it is again —

beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open . . ."

Exactly so, Ms. Oliver. While no poet has ever waxed rhapsodic about a zucchini, there is something in the precious, fragile beauty of newly unfolded flowers that speaks directly to our mortal hearts. In this I find sustenance and unfailing solace.