Best of Charlotte's Desk 2024!

Charlotte’s garden has been brimming with blooms all spring, summer, and fall. And all growing season Nature Hills has featured bouquets brimming with these flowers that have made their way into Charlotte’s Desk this year!

Check out the best of Charlotte’s Desk and find out how to recreate these looks in your own garden and bouquets next year!

There’s no need to have a huge garden to enjoy vase arrangements full of pretty blooms! Enjoy a cutting garden no matter how much room you have available when you mix your herbs, annuals, perennials, and shrubs in your garden, patio, or balcony. A bit of creativity and a lot less turf grass helps too!

Reducing how much lawn you have to mow and growing vertically in container gardens, and raised beds, means you will have more room for flowers and a lot less to mow during the summer months!

Any mixture of shrubs, perennials, herbs, and annuals can be used to create seasonal bouquets of your own! There is no need to coordinate anything because all of Ma Nature’s flowers match each other regardless of color!

Check out our Garden Blog on designing bouquets and container gardens with style!

Best of Charlotte’s Desk 2024

Here are Charlotte’s Desk bouquets that have been voted as fan favorites and links to the perennials and shrubs used in them so you can recreate your own bouquets next year!

#1 - Early Spring 

Early spring is when spring ephemeral bulbs reign supreme! This early spring delight features a wide variety of Tulips, Iris, Garden Phlox, and a few of springs wildflowers as filler. Recreate this look in your garden using:

1. Economy Medley Tulip Mixed Pack or any mixture you prefer of Nature Hills many Tulip varieties and variety packs available now!
2. Iris are fantastic thrillers in bouquets and in the garden! Try Caesars Brother Siberian Iris or any of the many Iris colors and varieties that you prefer! Space-saving and easy to grow, you can’t go wrong with these great perennials!
3. Phlox, including Tall Garden Phlox, are perfumed and airy spring flowers that bring an old world beauty to your landscape and lend a pretty filler to bouquets! Try Fashionably Early Crystal Hybrid Phlox or any of the many other colors and sizes available.
4. Also included in this bouquet are yellow Wintercress (aka: Yellow Rocket) which is a bee-friendly wildflower (or weed if it’s growing in the wrong place) that is commonly found in abandoned lots, along roadside ditches and in meadows!

#2 - Mid-Spring

This mid-spring bouquet is a vision in white and purples, featuring all the favorite blooms of mid-spring. Recreate this bouquet in your garden with:

1. Toad Flax are the tall, slender purple flowers in this bouquet and great in the garden for the Buckeye Butterflies and flowers all spring, summer, and fall! Get a similar look with Walker's Low Catmint, Gallery Blue Lupine, Perennial Salvia, or Anise Hyssop.
2. James MacFarlane Lilac - taller panicles of scented pink blooms a bit later in the spring
3. Allium - One of Charlotte’s favorite bulb plants, the Purple Rain Allium or Purple Sensation Allium will add whimsy to your cutting garden and bouquets!
4. Peony - Charlotte’s home is over 100 years old and has an original Peony that could very well have been planted back then! We don’t know what kind it is, but it smells heavenly! Try a similar white Peony, like Festiva Maxima Peony, or go with one of the many shades of pink, white, or near-red Peony available today!
5. Hosta leaves look great as greenery and the flowers become tall focal points in bouquets. Try Great Expectations Hosta or Autumn Frost Hosta for a similar look
6. Arrowwood Viburnum - cheerful white flowers in spring and blue berries in the fall!

#3 - Early Summer Blooms! 

The start of summer brings an entire wardrobe change to your landscape and June means Roses! Recreate this look with these early summer garden standards!

1. Nigra Hollyhock or any other kind of tall Hollyhock variety! Be ready to ensure this plant has room to grow because these perennials GET TALL! You can snip the main stem and create branching, and continue to snip stems for bouquets or deadhead often to enjoy flowers all summer and autumn long!
2. Bee Balm (Monarda) are incredible pollinator plants and the SUGAR BUZZ® Grape Gumball Bee Balm here will fill your garden with bees and unique jester cap style blooms. Try any one of our Bee Balms in your garden for weeks of bouquet additions too!
3. Asiatic Lily are large and long-lasting bouquet thrillers, and add a bright pop of color and larger form to your bouquets and garden beds! Try an Orange Asiatic Lily like what is pictured here or any one of our many space-saving summer flowering Lily varieties!
4. Knock Out® Roses start flowering now and if you deadhead (or cut plenty for floral arrangements) you’ll enjoy flowers until frost! There are Pink and Red Knock Out® Roses in this bouquet but other colors include White, Yellow, Rainbow, Coral, and Peachy Knock Out® varieties.

#4 Mid-Summer Glory 

Embodying the yellows and oranges of summer, our #4 bouquet has all the warm colors of the sun. Recreate this look in your garden with the following:

1. Tansy - an old world herb and garden border flower with especially ferny foliage and button-like yellow flowers. These bloom all summer and into the fall and ideal for bees and butterflies! Recreate this look with Moonshine Yarrow, Blanket Flower, or Coreopsis.
2. This bouquet has 3 kinds of Daylily - Apricot Sparkles Daylily, Purple de Oro Daylily and double Orange Daylily (another antique variety that came with Charlotte’s old house) are easy to grow summer perennials that blooms all summer! Check out all the fantastic Daylily here!
3. Anise Hyssop are wonderful herbal and ornamental perennials that Charlotte keeps in her garden for the bees and to dry for tea and potpourri. In addition to the usual purple native form, Hyssops come in a wide range of colors and sizes you can find here.
4. Dill plants are always in Charlotte’s garden but, oddly enough, are not used for anything but their flowers and the Eastern Black Swallowtail uses Dill as Host Plants for their caterpillars! The lacy leaves and flowers that look like summer fireworks are a favorite filler in bouquets. Check out Late & Blue Dill for a more compact form.
5. Sunflowers are amazing thrillers in bouquets and wildlife and bees love them in the garden! Hint: the more you snip, the more off shoots you get! That way you’ll enjoy more than just one big tall sunflower! Snip off the top when young and encourage branching unless height is what you’re going for in the landscape. Otherwise, check out Tuscan Sun perennial Sunflowers or Suncatcher Sunflowers that won’t need seeds replanted every year!
6. For some airy bits and bobs, Charlotte loves adding grass seed heads and plumes to bouquets and these Heavy Metal Switch Grass seeds are just the spray of burgundy needed to add some quirky filler. Find your own Ornamental Grasses for indoor and outdoor swaying fronds and plumes that add 4 seasons of interest to the landscape!

#5 Early Autumn Antique 

With the season winding down, the antique pinks and seed pods of this bouquet are prime examples of using more than just the flowers in your garden to create beautiful floral arrangements! Thinking outside the box gives you double the material to work with! Check out all that is in this bouquet to recreate your own!

1. Hyacinth Bean Seed Pods and their flowers a few weeks earlier are fantastic climbing vines that need so very little maintenance to look good. Just plant the seeds in spring and give them something climb on! Find a similar seed pod look on False Indigo plants.
2. Transitioning from white in the summer to hot pink and fading to an old-fashioned antique pink before turning botanical tan for the winter, Panicle Hydrangeas like these Berry White® Hydrangea blooms give you three different flowers on one plant throughout the year!
3. Tansy again, both the flowers and the ferny foliage add a pop of color and texture here.
4. Peach Drift® Groundcover Rose and Pink Knock Out® Roses are great groundcover and filler in the garden with a very long bloom time, and look stunning in a bouquet! Just watch out for the thorns when handling them for your floral arrangements.
5. Not numbered in the photo are the airy blooms of another type of Hyssop. Try Kudos™ Ambrosia Hyssop or Tango Hyssop to get the look.
6. Also not numbered, the long purple seed pods used as a pop of whimsy are the long seedheads of the Thai Basil. Not only does adding Herbs to your garden and bouquets smell wonderful, but the bees love them! You of course get plenty of yummy recipe additions all growing season too!

Plant Your Own Cutting Garden!

Want to recreate your favorite Charlotte’s Desk bouquets in your own garden? Check out these other plants to include in your garden design. That way, next year, your vases will also be brimming with flowers and you can enjoy your landscape view indoors and out!

Rose Bushes

You can use any kind of Rose for your garden if you have plenty of sun! There is a wide variety of Rose bush sizes to choose from, so regardless of how much room you have, you too can enjoy plenty of blossoms!

Charlotte’s Desk bouquets have nearly continuous supplies of Roses from June until frost because of regular deadheading (or snipping of stems for the arrangements), so there are always fresh Roses every week to two weeks!

• The Miss Congeniality™ Rose has been a fan-favorite in Charlotte’s Desk Bouquets! It is a showy white-petalled Rose with hot pink edges for a brilliant display. These are great specimen Roses for the garden bed.

• Drift® Roses - Coral Drift® Groundcover Roses have beautiful sprays of easy care, low-growing Roses that keep popping all growing season! Featuring a range of pinks, yellows, peachy corals, and oranges, the colors seem to change from bud to fully open bloom. Check out all the Drift® Roses here for your own! These are great for lining the fronts of garden beds, a garden along your front entry stairs, or filling in large areas with carefree color.
• Knock Out® Roses - Charlotte’s Desk uses Red Knock® Out and Pink Knock® Out Roses a lot because they are always replacing snipped and spent blooms reliability all year, leaving plenty of flowers on the shrub outdoors too! You can choose from a wide variety of Pink, Red, White, Peach, Apricot, Coral, Yellow, Rainbow, and bi-color Knock Out® Roses. These easy-to-grow Shrub Roses look great as mid to front of the garden fillers!

Pick Rose bush colors that you like best and go for Roses that are fragrant for double the benefits!

Flowering Shrubs

Choosing flowering shrubs that flower in the spring, summer, and fall gives you plenty to look at throughout the growing season! Plus many of these have summer or fall fruit/berries and fall color too! In addition to the ones noted above, Charlotte’s Desk bouquets have included these other flowering shrubs this year:

• Bloomerang® Lilac - Not one, but two flushes of scented flowers!
• Coralberry Bushes - not only are the summer flowers adorable, but the bubbly pink berries in the fall look great in the landscape, in the vase, or dried for crafting!
• Ninebark Bushes - the dramatic foliage stands out in the garden and the Little Devil™ Ninebark has great flowers, dark foliage, and unique seedpods throughout the year without taking up much space!
• Barberry - the golden foliage and bell-shaped blossoms look great as filler and have appeared in many Charlotte’s Desk bouquets, just be careful handling the thorned stems. Try similar Proven Winners® Sunjoy® Gold Pillar Barberry for a space-saving bright sunspot shrub that is perfect growing along where you don’t want foot traffic cutting through your yard.
• Solar Flare Prairieblues™ False Indigo which is a yellow, burgundy-brown and orange False Indigo and has beautiful foliage for bouquets too!

Perennials

Perennials are great space-saving plants that can bring a world of variety indoors and out! Even in container gardens when you don’t have a yard at all! Check out these other perennial favorites for your butterfly and cut flower garden that have appeared in Charlotte’s Desk bouquets this year!

• Columbines - Charlotte's spring favorite! Check all the varieties Nature Hills has for you
• Sea Holly - a burst of spikey silvery blue that flowers all summer and looks great dried too!
• Coneflower - Charlotte uses traditional native Coneflower for her pollinators, but you have a world of choices and forms to choose from in your garden! (she makes tea out of them too!)
• Catmint - Great for the kitties, tea, pollinators, and bouquets too!
• Salvia - There are so many kinds to choose from!
• Goldenrod - great fall yellow flowers that pollinators love and florists too!

Other garden standard perennials that have appeared in Charlotte’s Desk bouquets include Liatris, Coreopsis, Black-Eyed Susans, and Penstemon!

Plus, there are plenty of pollinator-friendly herbs and native ‘weeds’ like Motherwort, Chive flowers, Giant Yellow Hyssop, Sweet Autumn Clematis, native Yarrow, Rue, Purple Clematis, culinary Mint, and Garden Sage! Charlotte’s bouquets have even included rainbow Chard and other veggies as greenery! Potato flowers have even worked their way into a bouquet last year!

Remember to consistently deadhead perennials to encore new blooms until frost!

Annual Mixers

In addition to the many wildflowers and native ‘weeds’ Charlotte lets ramble in her garden, these are the usual additions you’ll find popping up in her bouquets!

• Marigolds
• Spike Celosia
• Zinnia
• Cosmos
• “Weeds” like Daisy Flea Bane, Queen Annes Lace, Wild Four O’Clocks, Bouncing Bet (Soapwort) and Yellow Sweet Clover

The great thing about annuals is you can change them each year and have a different feel and color mixer for your cut flower garden from last year! These are all incredibly easy to grow and don’t take up much room either!

Create Your Own (Insert Your Name Here)’s Desk Bouquets!

Bring the outdoors indoors and enjoy your garden while you sit at your desk at work with your own custom bouquets each week that are sure to make coworkers jealous they didn’t think of it first! Everyone will be raving about Your Desk Bouquet each week and stopping by your desk to see it first!

All you need is a vase (preferably one that won’t tip over easily and spill), clean water with changes daily, some floral preservatives (optional), and a bit of creativity! Start small and work your way up as you gain confidence arranging your own blooms next year!

Nature Hills is here to help you squeeze every ounce of enjoyment from your garden with plants that pull double duty indoors and out! For now it’s nearly winter and Charlotte’s Desk will be empty until spring. But we’ll be back with more Charlotte’s Desk bouquets for inspiration in the spring of 2025!

Happy Planting!