I have a friend who grows flowers in her own garden for a local farmers’ market and she cannot produce enough bunches of garden flowers to satisfy her eager customers.

All of them tell her that they are fed up with supermarket bunches of the same old thing. Pinks, chrysanthemums, alstroemerias are available all year long, jetted in from Kenya and other countries, and people are getting thoroughly fed up with them.
When I was a small child in the 1950s cut flowers were very different. They were produced in this country in summer, with earlier flowers usually coming from Cornwall and the Channel Islands. This meant that spring flowers only came in spring, soft pastel roses and campanulas were available in the first half of summer, daisies and chrysanthemums in autumn. How I wish it was like this now.
Lots of British nurserymen grew cut flowers in the early years of the 20th century. They tried to improve their plants in order to get more money for them. Early flowers that preempted the main season earned a premium price. This is how miniature garden narcissi came about.

Alec Grey, who grew daffodils commercially in the Tamar Valley, hybridised some very early-flowering Spanish species with traditional Tamar varieties in a bid to breed much earlier flowers that would earn him more money. He was helped out by the exceptionally warm summer of 1949, when lots of daffodils were prompted to set seed. He gathered one particular pod from ‘Cyclataz’ and it contained three seeds which he sowed.  One was named ‘Jumblie’, a twin-headed yellow with swept-back petals. Another was ‘Quince’, a fairly rare multi-headed soft-yellow. The third was the famous
‘Tête à Tête’. 
‘Tête à Tête’ was launched in 1956 and at first each bulb sold for five shillings. The price doubled following an RHS First Class Certificate in 1962. Shortly afterwards the Dutch breeders began to raise millions of tons of ‘Tête à Tête’. However Dutch growers are now beginning to stop growing it because they can’t make any money from it any more.
In 19th-century France, lilacs were commonly forced for spring flower, but they had single flowers that looked rather weedy. Victor Lemoine (1823-1911), a French nurseryman who was the first foreigner to be awarded the Victoria Medal of Horticulture by the RHS, found himself confined to his home by a night-time curfew imposed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He began breeding double forms of Syringa vulgaris and he and his descendants (Émile Lemoine (1862-1942) and Henri Lemoine (1897-1982) introduced over 200 new lilac cultivars.

However Victor was very short-sighted and this made hybridising with tweezers and a paintbrush difficult, especially on tall plants like lilac. It’s said he sent his wife Marie-Louise up the ladder to make his crosses instead.

He named a fine white fragrant double ‘Madame Lemoine’.
Lots of plants were highly bred for cut flowers and all the varieties of Paeonia lactiflora with French names were produced for the flower market and not for our gardens.
It now seems many of us want to return to those days when cut flowers followed the seasons, starting with the earliest violets and snowdrops and going on through the year.