Having these garden plants around your home and in your gardens is a great way to bring beautiful decor and more into your home for a fraction of the price you’d spend using store-bought items.
If you have a garden and/or a bit of green space around your home, chances are that you already have quite a bit of selection when it comes to plants that you can cut and snip throughout the year to bring inside – maybe even more than you realize. Identifying, planning, and collecting these clip-able plants also provides a productive excuse to get off your screens and get outside for some fresh air and sunshine. With a bit of careful planning and planting, you can add to this assortment and create a 4-season cutting garden to stock your home and your kitchen throughout the year. Separated by season, here are the best clip-able garden plants you can grow and discover in your backyard and green spaces.
Spring – Early Blooms
Designing your gardens t0 bloom early in spring is a magnificent gift you can give yourself every year. Having ornamental flowers to clip from these gardens is also a great excuse to get outside and enjoy the arrival of the season as you watch your efforts grow and blossom into beauty that will brighten up your home.
Early-spring blooms for your home: How to Grow Tulips
Forsythia
Our forsythia plants are always the first splash of color to mark the arrival of spring in our flower beds. The bright-yellow blossoms welcome the warmer weather, and a few clipped flowering branches look great in a vase on the coffee table or a kitchen island. You can also force forsythia in the late winter for an early start to your spring decorating. Forsythias are fast-growing, hardy plants and an absolute essential if you’d like to enjoy blooms as early in the year as possible.
Already have a forsythia bush? Learn How to Propagate Forsythia
Tulips
Planting a few tulip bulbs in your landscaping in the fall will earn you an array of amazing colors that look great in your gardens, but also in your home. With a little planning ahead, you can enjoy a bouquet of cut flowers with a variety of beautiful hues in your favorite room every spring, or you can choose all-white flower varieties like I do.
Keep your tulips looking great: How To Prevent Drooping Tulips in a Vase
Peonies
Another low-maintenance, easy-to-grow heirloom plant variety, peonies can be seen blooming in many different usda hardiness zones in the late spring and early summer months. Well-established peonies often require little watering or effort to maintain and their energetic stems push up through the drab of winter every spring.
Already growing peonies? Grow more: How to Divide Peony Plants
A Cutting Garden of Perennial Flowers
If you have planting space and little time, why not combine some of the plants mentioned above with some of your own favorite easy-care perennial plants by creating your own perennial cutting garden? You may find that you’re reluctant to remove the blooms from perennial garden plant types found along with the shrubs, roses, and other foundation plantings meant to improve curb appeal, so setting aside an area specifically for cutting can be a great idea. Experiment with different species and find some that grow well in your soil and environmental conditions but also look splendid in your home.
Garden ideas to help you get started: How to Start a Perennial Cutting Garden
Summer – Food For Thought
When we think of vegetable gardening we think of long growing seasons and a big harvest at the end, however, these snack sized horticultural treats will not only grow quickly but actually thrive and grow stronger if you clip them throughout their growing season, whether they’re grown in the veggie patch or in patio pots along with the ferns.
Read next for more garden inspiration: How to Rescue a Completely Overgrown Garden
Chives
Chives are a great herb plant for even very inexperienced gardeners because they’ll pop up every spring, are reliably resistant to pests, drought tolerant, happy in different types of soils, and require little to no maintenance. They’ll grow even stronger if the plant is harvested evenly throughout the year, making chives the perfect clipable, edible plant.
Beginner gardener must-have: How to Grow Chives
Salad Greens
Salad greens are easy to grow and can be harvested quickly from spring into late-summer and beyond. Growing them is a fun way to sneak some healthy vegetables into your diet. These leafy vegetables go from seed to bowl in just a few weeks, and cutting them from your own garden will save you money on your grocery bill, too.
Fall – Seasonal Porch Decor
Repurposing plants grown for food into autumn decor has been a harvest-time tradition for decades if not centuries. Here are two classic vegetable garden staples that will elevate your fall porch decor.
Pumpkins and Gourds
Once properly sown, pumpkin plants will grow rapidly over the summer, providing lush foliage in your vegetable garden. At harvest time, gather your botanical bounty for seeds and classic pumpkin pies while leaving a few to add to a fall front porch. You can also mix in interesting gourds and squashes and grow them all together in your pumpkin patch.
Grow your own: How to Grow Pumpkins
Corn Stalks
The classic cornstalk is a vegetable plant that can be clipped from your garden for decor without sacrificing any of the edible portions. After most of the golden ears make their way onto your dinner table the rest of the stalk, leaves, and tassel can be dried out and displayed to complete the perfect autumnal porch.
Get the tutorial: How to Dry Corn Stalks to Use in Fall Decor
Winter – Bringing in a Little Green
Finding a little green to bring into your home has been a part of the holiday season for many years. The wealth of evergreen boughs in your own backyard or green space is also an inexpensive way to enhance the holiday and winter decor in your favourite cozy spaces.
More home decor inspiration with fresh greens: Natural Christmas Front Porch With Foraged Greenery
Gathering Greenery
If you have access to a little bit of green space, you can almost definitely find some amazing winter decor out there for free! The great thing about fresh greenery is that it also just makes everything else that you use to decorate with look so much better.
The Creek Line House: Gathering Greenery
Mini Cedar Wreath
Use your collected greenery to create a festive cedar mini wreath. Create this fresh and fragrant wreath in the perfect, custom size with just a few simple materials.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.