These wildflower buttonholes are in tiny phials of water to keep them fresh until the very last minute.
Wildflowers are difficult to use in flower-foam floristry because their stems tend to be too delicate for any pushing.
What to grow
For a spring wedding, you’ll need to get your planting done in the autumn of the previous year. There are so many options to choose from, but (whatever the season) I’d suggest you aim to have between five and seven types of flower in your arrangements and posies, along with any other goodies you have been able to find that are in flower at the time of your ceremony.
Work out how many stems you’re going to need before you plant (see Chapter 1) – you don’t need to be too exact, but it’s useful to know whether it’s 300, 600, 1,000 . . .
This bride’s bouquet is made up of lots of interesting tulips, which are not the sort you’d easily find in inexpensive bunches at your local florist or supermarket. The cream double, especially, which is called ‘Verona’, has the most delicious lemony vanilla scent.
Bulbs
Bulbs are the obvious flower to plant for spring weddings. There are myriad different shapes and colours to tempt you: from scented narcissi to subtle ornithogalum; from huge-headed Darwin Hybrid tulips to delicate bluebells, from snake’s head fritillaries to bold, tall irises. Take your time looking through the bulb catalogues and think about how you can best use your space and budget. Bulbs can be expensive, and part of the point of growing your own wedding flowers is that you’ll save a good deal of money. I have to admit that it’s difficult not to go mad with a bulb catalogue, as there’s so much to entice you.
You might allow the colours of the bulb flowers to influence the colours of your wedding. I’m a great fan of the cowslip / white narcissus / ballet-shoe-pink mix – but you may prefer rich purples or bright tulip pinks.
Choose bulbs for scent, for shape and size, and for the fact that you can’t buy those flowers elsewhere for less than it will cost you to grow them. Grow more unusual varieties, which will be expensive to buy cut.
Your bulbs will be much better quality (and considerably better value) if ordered directly from wholesalers, whether online or through mail-order catalogues. Wholesalers these days will sell to anyone who wants to buy, not just the trade – the price just gets better the more you order. Bulbs from wholesalers will have been kept in optimum conditions and be just right for planting. Not only that, but a good supplier (see Resources section for recommendations) will give you excellent advice on varieties to grow and what will be in flower when. Some bulb catalogues are arranged so that you can see all the kinds of bulbs that will flower together throughout spring – very helpful if you’re not sure about what combinations will work well.
Do tell the supplier when you’d like your bulbs to be delivered, otherwise they may come too early for you to be ready to plant.
Choose bulbs for scent, for shape and size (biggest isn’t always best . . .), and for the fact that you can’t buy those flowers elsewhere for less than it will cost you to grow them. By this I mean that planting a sack of cheap daffs or narcissi may not be cheaper than buying them as cut-flower stems, even still relatively locally grown. Grow more unusual varieties, which will be expensive to buy cut.
Anemones
Don’t forget these delicate little round-petalled, daisy-shaped flowers. They come in all sorts of colours, from sapphire blues and ruby reds to whites and to creams with delicate pinkish edges. Their button-like centres remind me of Victorian frogging for a gentleman’s smoking jacket. They can be short-stemmed, but they work very well bunched in posies and in jam jars. If you have some space in a polytunnel or greenhouse, then growing them under cover will have them flowering earlier, though don’t forget to feed and water them. Give them seaweed solution once they begin to bud up, to achieve better stem length and lots of repeat-flowering.
Anemones in a wildflower wedding mix, with forget-me-nots and white deadnettle as well as honesty, cow parsley and cowslips.
Bluebells
Spanish bluebells have a stronger head, with more flowers, than the UK native bluebell, but they hybridize with our native bluebell and set seed in the wild, so I prefer to grow the delicate, native stock. You’re unlikely to be able to grow masses of bluebells in time for your wedding, because they’re often sold ‘in the green’ – freshly dug up in clumps after flowering, in late spring. But if you have a friend with a patch of bluebells in their garden, or you have permission to cut some from a nearby wood, then a handful of these beauties in a bride’s bouquet is just stunning.
Grape hyacinths
Your mother may shoot you if you say you’d like to plant a lot of this often-invasive bulb variety, but for value for money and that lovely, perfect true blue, grape hyacinths (muscari) make a very good wedding flower. Giving sharp little uprights for buttonholes, dots of blue for bouquets – if you don’t have bluebells, grape hyacinths make a good alternative. Look for taller varieties, to get a bit more stem length for your posies.
This is a ‘pew end’ posy attached to a chair. If you do attach jam-jar posies in this way, use a little Blu-tack to stop it swinging and spilling water on your guests. This posy can later be used as a table centrepiece.
Grape hyacinths work well in buttonholes, posies and elsewhere, but they are short-stemmed, so don’t expect them to be any use in tall arrangements.
Irises
For great height and structure, do plant some irises. They’ll last a week in water if you cut them when the colour is just showing at the tip of the top flower. However, for wedding flowers, wait until they’re more open than that. You need wedding flowers to last 2 or 3 days from cutting, and be fully open for the event itself, not just stand in a vase for a week. The bearded iris flowers later than the traditional-for-cutting Dutch iris – too late for a spring wedding. But Dutch irises planted in autumn will flower beautifully for you the following spring. The pure white with a lemon tongue is gorgeously spring-like.
Ornithogalum
I’m a great fan of this grey-and-white scilla-like flower, known often as star of Bethlehem. For a pale, silvery-grey, vintage look, this makes an unusual flower, which your guests might not have seen before. As with fritillaries and grape hyacinths, pull rather than cut the stems in order to get more stem length for use in your posies.
Grey-and-white ornithogalum is stunning in this buttonhole with one tulip, an anemone, lime foliage and a spray of spiraea leaf.
Ranunculus
For brides who would like a rose shape in springtime, the ranunculus is the perfect alternative to a real rose. I often use ranunculus in spring floristry, and am surprised at how frequently I’m asked which rose they are. Plant them under cover if you can, for an early crop, but they’ll flower happily outside in a protected patch, perhaps in the shelter of a warm wall. Choose interesting colours: there are lovely white varieties with pink and purple picotee edges, as well as bright yellows and oranges and tall, floaty whites. Also known as Persian buttercups, they like free-draining soil, but will get mildew if they dry out too much, so do remember to water as well as feed them if they’re under cover.
Ranunculus in a spring mix does the job that a rose or peony might do later in the season.
“WHO GIVES THIS WOMAN TO BE WED?”
This question was asked of fathers, or the male head of a family, in the days when marriages were arranged between families, and brides didn’t necessarily have a choice. The line is often changed now, as the person who ‘gives away’ the bride can be a mum, a brother, a sister, a grandparent – whoever the bride chooses to accompany her down the aisle.
Snake’s head fritillaries
Associated with ancient meadows, the wild snake’s head fritillary is cheap to buy as a bulb (or 100 bulbs), and makes a surprisingly good cut flower. Be aware, though, that when you put 100 bulbs into the ground, you may only get 20 or 30 flowering stems: mice will have your fritillary bulbs, and birds will have the flowers if
they can. We find that fritillaries do much better in the sward of the orchard than in a raised bed, though if you only want perhaps five or six for the bride’s bouquet, then by all means just put them in a mouse-and-bird-proofable pot and grow them that way.
Pull the stems rather than cut them, and you’ll get longer stems to use in posies. The stems of these delicate flowers are very fragile, so support them in posies with other foliage and flowers around them, to stop the fritillaries from collapsing. We find they grow much more happily in a meadow situation (as they would in the wild) than in beds where, without much competition, they can be too short-stemmed even for little posies.
A snake’s head fritillary used in a mix of spring flowers gives the whole mix an unusual look.
Tulips
For size of flower, strong structure, variety of colour and (perhaps surprisingly) height, tulips are a great idea to grow for wedding flowers. Whether you choose a scheme of, say, pure white or rich purples and oranges, there will be a tulip to give you the colour you want to build your wedding look around. If you’d like accessories to match your flowers, then your tulip colour is a great basis from which to choose table runners, chair bows or ribbons. Just a few tulips in a wildflower posy give it good structure, and something stronger for the delicate wildflowers to frame. Equally, three tall tulips in a vintage bottle look gorgeous as a really simple table decoration. The huge-headed Darwin Hybrids open out beautifully when brought into the warm, and will be as dramatic as peonies or roses in a spring scheme.
As I said in Chapter 1, you could simply plant 500 tulips and have your whole wedding done that way. The challenge is to choose tulips that will definitely be in flower for your wedding date. Take good advice: look at the bulb catalogues, and talk to the bulb suppliers – they are generally very helpful. Some tulips start flowering quite early, while others go on until the first roses are out – so you need to choose varieties that suit your date.
A bride’s posy of tulips, narcissi, grape hyacinths and early-season foliage. The scent is as gorgeous as the look.
Pure white narcissus ‘Thalia’, with her gorgeous scent, flowering in the first year after being planted the previous autumn.
Container bulbs
If you’re planting bulbs as part of your scheme, plant some in containers too. These make lovely displays, which you can simply put in place all in one piece without cutting them to dress your wedding. Attractively potted-up tulips look stunning either side of the church door, while wooden crates of flowering anemones will give a farmers’-market look to your scheme.
In addition, smaller containers can be used as table centrepieces. Plant up teacups with miniature narcissi and grape hyacinths, dot them down the table centres, with jars of pussy willow to give the scheme height, and your wedding will be a gorgeous mix of miniature gardens.
Pots of planted-up flowering bulbs can be put in and out of warmth to get them flowering at the right time. Or, if all else fails, they can be bought at the garden centre at the last minute!
Plant some bulbs in containers too. These make lovely displays, which you can simply put in place all in one piece without cutting them to dress your wedding. And smaller containers can be used as table centrepieces.
Planting bulbs for cutting
Planting bulbs for cutting is a different business from planting bulbs for naturalizing in beds or even in long grass. If you order in a good lot of bulbs to grow for a wedding, then you could plant them in beds almost shoulder to shoulder and not necessarily as deeply as you might for naturalizing. They won’t take up too much space and will be close to one another for convenient cutting, and then after they’ve flowered you might move them to somewhere else to naturalize (settle in and flower year after year) or give them away to people who’ve been helpful.
Remember that if you plan for the bulbs to flower again next year, you have to be careful not to cut the foliage when you cut the flowers. The plants will need to absorb goodness from the foliage for the bulbs to use as food for the following year’s flowering. If, however, you really are just growing for your wedding, then you needn’t worry and can use the foliage in your arrangements. Flower farmers tend to treat tulips, in particular, as annuals, as the bulbs are relatively cheap. They’ll pull the whole bulb out of the ground when cutting, and discard the bulb straight on to the compost heap when the flowering stem is conditioning in a bucket. This may seem harsh, but it’s certainly a speedy way to handle cutting flowers for your wedding.
Biennials
I talk about biennials in detail in the next chapter, because they’ll be more reliably flowering in early summer. I’m writing this as we come into mid spring, and, while I am cutting a few wallflowers, and the Icelandic poppies are budding up, the rest of my biennials are still weeks and weeks away from flowering. So, if you’re in a warm spot and your wedding is in late spring, biennials are a possibility, and by all means look at the biennials section in Chapter 5 to help you decide whether to include them in your scheme – but for most spring weddings I wouldn’t count on them.
Hardy annuals
I mention hardy annuals here only to say that for a spring wedding I wouldn’t invest time in trying to grow them to be in flower for your big day. If you’re an experienced grower and have some space under cover, then you might try to have sweet peas and cornflowers ready for a wedding in spring, but I think there’s plenty of other material to work with, and, if I were you, I’d focus on the kinds of plants I’ve described in the preceding pages. Your time is limited, and the amount of stress you put on yourself should be carefully controlled. After all, a wedding is a day to be looked forward to for its joy and laughter, not with dread because your sweet peas don’t look as though they’ll be in flower yet.
If you really want to have hardy annuals in flower for a spring wedding, do look at the next chapter for information on autumn sowing of hardy annuals.
Top tips for spring wedding flowers
As in any season, aim for about five to seven types of flower, plus other goodies you can find. For a spring wedding, a basic ingredients list of, say, tulips, narcissi, cowslips, ornithogalum and grape hyacinths can be dotted about with occasional precious heads of fritillaries, bluebells, the first aquilegias, fruit-tree blossom, oak leaves . . .
When ordering your bulbs from the wholesaler, remember to say when you’d like them to be delivered, so you’re ready for them.
Do plant some bulbs in attractive pots. These can be brought indoors to force the flowers to open earlier, if necessary. Put them at the entrance to the ceremony venue, or to frame the ceremony itself, and use smaller containers as table centrepieces.
Spring cut flowers may be a little floppy (wilty) with sappy new growth. Be prepared to sear floppy stems, and practise your cutting technique, so that you can be confident that after a night of good conditioning, your flower stems will be upright again and ready for arranging.
Spring bulbs can be short-stemmed. Pull them gently from the ground, and you’ll get several inches more stem length than if you cut them.
Wildflower buttonholes are gorgeous for a spring wedding.
Flowers arranged using a wide range of bulbs planted the previous autumn and flowering just on time.
A SPRING WEDDING AT A GRAND OLD HOUSE ON THE SOMERSET LEVELS
This bride and groom wanted really wild-looking posies for their mid-spring wedding, and, despite the grandeur of the venue (one of the oldest continuously inhabited houses in the whole of the UK, with parts of it dating back to the fourteenth century), I think the posies worked well. After all, old houses become part of the landscape, and these wild, herby, tussy-mussy-style posies look wonderful in the light of these old rooms. The ceremony took place in a beautiful ballroom, which was then transformed for the wedding breakfast.
A posy of spring wildflowers like this one will need careful conditioning before being used for floristry. A lot of sappy new growth means they can be floppy when cut. But when it works . . . very pretty.
A buttonhole of white pear blossom and herb foliage is beautiful, but it won’t last in the warmth all day. You could make a spare for the groom if you plan to have more photographs when his first buttonhole may be struggling.
The bride was clever with her budget and chose to turn the bridesmaids’ and her own bouquet into table centrepieces after the ceremony. This would be an efficient way to keep down the number of stems you need to cut and arrange yourself if you’re growing your own.
The flowers for this wedding were based on a wild, green background, and were all cut from what was available – just the best in the garden on the day. This meant that the colours had a real garden feel, and the arrangements didn’t look too ‘designed’. Very fresh.
Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 6