Now is the time that gardens are really paying dividends with many flowers in full bloom. And now is the time to reap the rewards of your labours by brightening up your home with flowers from the garden. Providing and arranging cut flowers for the house, and occasionally the restaurants, at Glyndebourne is always something I enjoy. We tend to use annuals such as sweet peas, Antirrhinums and Sweet William for this. These are easy-to-grow, unfussy plants that have a long vase life.

Peonies, alliums and Dutch iris are the perennial backbone of the cutting garden but the plant we grow most of for flower arranging is a rose. Rosa Elina is particularly good, it has large, pale-cream blooms and flowers prolifically all through the summer. I have even made a display with this rose in December. It can suffer a little from unsightly rain damage but you can remove the outer petals to get over the problem. At Glyndebourne we have 40 bushes of this rose but even a single specimen will give you plenty of flowers for the house and for the garden.

I try to be adventurous in my choice of plants. If there is a plant I would like to use but am not sure of its vase life, I will cut a stem of it to see how it performs before I need to make an arrangement.

One of the most challenging cut flowers we grow is the Iceland Poppy (Papaver nudicaule). These are brightly coloured poppies with tissue paper flowers that look great when arranged in bowls.

In a large garden like Glyndebourne we can also pick small quantities of flowers from the garden to add to our arrangements. A plant we use a lot, both for its flowers and its foliage, is Choisya ternata. Also known as Mexican Orange, this aromatic medium-size shrub has sprays of dainty white flowers and glossy, evergreen foliage. Both look stunning in the silver bowls that we use for table arrangements and are well worth trying to grow.

Get more hints and tips from Kevin Martin on this flower arranging video glyndebourne.com/how-make-glyndebourne-bouquet