Grow your own Wedding Flowers

by Georgie Newbery

  The groom’s buttonhole had a single white bluebell, pear blossom, and early-season foliage. It was beautiful against his French blue suit.

  The posies were recycled into table centrepieces using blue glass Mason jars, of which the bride had found a boxful at a flea market some months before.

  This wedding, at Maunsel House near Taunton, was photographed by Bath-based photographer Howell Jones Photography (www.howelljonesphotography.co.uk).

  When you’re planning, think carefully. Manage your expectations, and you will be thrilled by the results.

  With autumn sowing of hardy annuals to set you up with a good crop, and some judicious re-sowing early in the year to bulk up your stock in case you need it, you can do a whole wedding in early summer with just annuals. Biennials will be flowering if you planned far enough in advance to get them in the previous year. But even without biennials, a space the size of an allotment bed, cleared and sown with annuals early in the previous autumn, can supply flowers for a whole wedding. And don’t forget the perennials: if you have roses you can use, if there are peonies in Grandma’s garden, then it would be a shame to waste them.

  Early summer – time for what we call the full Fragonard of roses wedding.

  So when you’re planning, remember those 600 stems I spoke of in Chapter 1, and think carefully. Imagine how many roses you really can get from your garden, and how many peonies from Grandma’s. Remember that peonies don’t flower for long (although their foliage is always useful), and that you can’t guarantee when roses will begin to bloom. Don’t look at two rose bushes and imagine you’ll have a hundred roses. You might have five or ten good ones for the day. So plan accordingly. Keep the roses for your bride’s bouquet, and maybe one each for the bridesmaids. Manage your expectations, and you will be thrilled by the results.

  A small wedding scheme cut and conditioning on a bench in the shade.

  Thankfully, in early summer, the masses of annuals you’ll have sown for the occasion will fill any space left by over-early peonies, or not-quite-abundant-enough roses. A good patch of ammi majus, sown direct or in trays the previous autumn, or even direct-sown in early spring, will be flowering now and give you clouds of white lace with which to frame your wedding. Cornflowers sown in early autumn will be in full flower, while those sown in early spring will be just beginning to be at their best.

  A bouquet made with roses, philadelphus, flowering annuals and one late buttercup. I’m a great fan of not being too matchy-matchy with flowers, and this is a great mix of brights for a classic cottage-garden look.

  A good-sized patch of ammi majus to cut will give you lots of lacy froth with which to frame your flowers.

  What’s in the garden already?

  If you’re able to start planning a full year before your wedding date, look at the established gardens available to you and make a list of what you might use from them. Is there a path edged with alchemilla, thyme or catmint? Are there tall spires of delphiniums at the back of the border? Are there roses that you could cut for your bride’s and bridesmaids’ bouquets? Lamb’s ears for framing posies and giving a velvety background to the buttonholes? And what colour are the flowers you can use? There: now you have the backbone, the main palette of your colour scheme, and you can sow annuals to work with what you already have.

  FLOWER MEANINGS

  There are so many meanings associated with flowers, and often the sources are contradictory. I always choose the nicest meaning – and here are a few:

  dahlias: for a proud moment

  daisies: for loyal love

  ears of corn: for fecundity

  honeysuckle: for constant devotion

  ivy: for fidelity

  myrtle: ancient symbol of marriage

  oak: for strength

  rosemary: for remembrance

  roses:

  • orange/apricot for passion

  • pink for love and gratitude

  • red for love and romance

  • white for marriage

  • yellow for joy and good health

  sunflowers: for loyalty and longevity

  sweet peas: for having a lovely time.

  Foliage

  At this time of year, shrubby foliage in the garden can still be a bit hit-and-miss to condition. Do practise conditioning shrubby greenery before using it (see Chapter 3), to make sure you’re confident that you can keep it standing well for the day or three you’ll need it for your wedding flowers. I do think greenery is necessary in floristry: it not only helps separate the flowers in the bouquet so that you can see them, but also gives the arrangement a depth of field. To my mind, floristry is really just about making miniature gardens – and only in rather dread schemes of municipal planting are you likely to find flowerbeds with no greenery. The best country-house herbaceous borders are framed with greenery, and so are the best bouquets.

  In early summer there’s beginning to be a mass of greenery in the garden – not only tree and shrub foliage, but also from herbaceous perennials. Who do you know with an established patch of alchemilla? This is perhaps my favourite greenery of all. If you don’t have ready access to a good supply of foliage or don’t trust your shrubby greenery not to wilt, for an early-summer wedding you could grow bupleurum and euphorbia oblongata. Both hardy, both will flower from an autumn sowing. If they are to be your only greenery, then you might grow quite a lot of them: perhaps twice as much as you would for each of the flowers you’re going to use.

  And for more, different kinds of foliage, be creative with what’s available: ammi visnaga has wonderful foliage, which looks great in cut flowers; nigella has gorgeous, sharply cut foliage, which works especially well in buttonholes, as it’s not wilty. All of the late-season perennials will be shooting strongly, even if they’re not yet in flower – cut these strong shoots for your floristry, and you’ll be giving your garden a handy Chelsea chop (a little late, but the plants won’t mind) at the same time.

  Remember to look at the silver-coloured foliage in your garden as well. Perhaps you could cut that artemisia your Aunty Mary has edging her hot, dry bed. Lamb’s ears has not only lovely silver foliage but also interesting spikes of velvety silver flowers. And soft, silvery cineraria, with its lovely cut-out shapes, is a favourite with brides.

  Hosta leaves, in all their interesting varieties of colour, collar bouquets and posies beautifully (so long as the slugs haven’t got at them). And don’t forget the herbs: mint is great as foliage, thyme is short-stemmed but lovely in posies and will very likely be in flower at this time of year, and rosemary gives you gorgeous, sharply scented spikes of shape and structure for your bouquets.

  Wildflowers

  There will be red campion in the hedgerows, buttercups in the fields, ox-eye daisies and lovely coppery wild sorrel seedheads to cut for wild ingredients in wedding flowers. The red valerian will be flowering, and wild foxgloves too. Meadow cranesbill is beautiful to look at, but almost impossible to condition successfully, so I’d leave that where it is. Equally, unless you have a personal, private swathe of orchids, perhaps leave these rare beauties – which are re-establishing themselves around our once over-poisoned land, but slowly. Ox-eye daisies are delightful in flower arrangements; however, do be wary of using too many of them, as they make the water they sit in stink as though a cat has peed in the house.

  Wildflowers do cut and stand happily in water, although they are more delicate than their cultivar cousins. They tend to have fragile stems that are easy to bruise or snap, so they’re difficult to use in flower-foam floristry. It’s best to use them in water rather than try to get the stems into flower foam (see Chapter 4).

  Wildflower growing

  The wildflowers I’ve mentioned above are all perennial. We grow them by sowing the seed in trays in early summer the year before we expect them to flower, and then planting out the seedlings in the autumn. We grow red campion and ox-eye daisies in flowerbeds. Be warned, though, that if you do this they will invade the space they’re
given. We cut both by the armful through the season, but if you want only a few stems to give your posies a wild feel, you may be better off keeping an eye out for a wild patch from which you can cut opportunistically (with permission if it doesn’t belong to you!). See Resources section for a good supplier of wildflower seed.

  If you’re growing a garden in which you will hold your wedding reception, and you desire an instant meadow for the event, then you might think about scraping off the top layer of soil and sowing wildflower seed. A cornfield mix is a quick-flowering mix of annuals which ought to shoot and flower on raked ground without too much difficulty, and is generally sown to flower in early summer. However, while easy, cornfield mixes can be a bit hit-and-miss, if you’re looking for a perfect carpet of wildflowers to frame your day. You could cheat, if your budget allows. You can buy wildflower-seeded meadow grass matting, which you roll out on to the earth to grow into an instant meadow. We used these once to make meadow runners down the middle of the tables at a wedding reception, though I will admit that the stress involved in having the meadow in full flower and perfectly good condition in time for the wedding is not something I’d like to repeat.

  What to grow

  Well, with time and planning, you have a really wide choice of flowers to grow for an early-summer wedding. As I mention in other chapters, the skill is to edit the choice of what you’ll grow to a tight five to seven different varieties. These will create the background, the base, in which those few roses or peonies can shine. Choose varieties that will work hard for you, to fill a gap in case there is one. Think about the shapes of bouquets and posies, and plant so that you have the necessary variety (accent flowers, daisy shapes, lace caps . . .) to make those shapes (see Chapter 1).

  A bride’s bouquet with roses, a foxglove, sweet peas, ammi majus, annual chrysanthemums, feverfew and achillea.

  Hardy annuals

  Direct-sow some hardy annuals in the autumn and another crop in early spring, and the autumn-sown ones will be flowering well for an early-summer wedding, with the spring-sown ready to take over if you’ve had a warm spring and the autumn-sown flowers are starting to look tired. See below for more details.

  Your plants will need feeding and staking (see Chapter 2), and don’t forget that they’ll also need cutting! Annuals have one desire in life: to set seed. After this they will die. Your challenge is to stop them setting seed – at least until after your wedding day. So as soon as they start flowering, no matter when your wedding date, you must start cutting the flowers they’re producing. The more you cut, the more flowers you’ll get.

  The flowers you cut can be used to practise making posies and bouquets (see ‘How to make a hand-tied posy or bouquet’). The more you practise, the better you’ll be prepared for the amount of flowers you’ll need to create your dream, and the faster you’ll get at making posies. You may think “Oh, we’ll just have lots of posies dotted about the place,” but practising making them will focus your mind, and you’ll quickly realize that it’s worth deciding how many posies you’ll have, so that you know how many flowers to cut and how long it’s going to take to make them.

  The hardy annual orlaya growing through pea netting arranged horizontally as support across a bed.

  Which hardy annuals to grow?

  There are so many hardy annuals available to cut-flower growers that I could write a whole book about them alone. So here, as an example, I’m giving a short list of those I would grow if I were growing for my wedding. I’m remembering that I’m looking for flowers to do specific jobs in my mix: I need lace, spikes, greenery, scent, and flowers that won’t wilt in buttonholes. I know that there’ll be roses and peonies that I can cut from established gardens, so essentially my hardy annuals are to provide filler. Personally, for an early-summer date I would certainly grow more sweet peas than anything else – but that’s because they’re my favourite cut flower of all.

  Take time to trawl through the good seed catalogues, whether on paper or online (see Resources section for recommendations). Read the growing tips, look at what the seed suppliers recommend, and choose flowers that work well together, as well as making an interesting mix of textures and shapes. The choice is wide, so give yourself plenty of time to think about it before you make any decisions.

  Ammi majus

  With its large, frothy, lacy white flower heads, ammi majus can be used as a frothy lace edging to larger, accent flowers; is useful as filler in posies and bouquets; and can equally be used as a stand-alone flower massed in a jug or perhaps a milk churn. We sow it in fortnightly batches from early spring onwards, in order to ensure a long season filled with ammi froth. It can be wilty if cut when the flowers aren’t fully out, so be prepared to give it a good, long condition in water overnight before using it in floristry.

  Bupleurum

  This provides useful greenery to make a good understorey for your bouquets and posies, especially useful to grow if you have no alchemilla to hand. The lovely acid-green of the leaves and miniature flowers will add a bit of zing to your floristry. It will seed itself all over your garden if you let it, so, once you’ve grown it for your wedding, you may find you have it for years to come. Look for different varieties – a bronzy leaf, or a more acid-yellow flower.

  Tiny acid-green flowers of bupleurum conditioning with sweet pea ‘Painted Lady’. The bupleurum gives the pinks and whites of this scheme a background to shine against.

  Clary sage

  These lovely spikes of coloured leaf bracts are available in white, blue and pink. The spikes grow beautifully tall, so the flowers are useful for height in bigger arrangements, as well as for backing in buttonholes, or to stop a bouquet having too smooth and lifeless a dome to it. Very happy growing in a hot, dry patch.

  Cornflowers

  With small, dense flower heads in pink, white or blue, cornflowers bloom prolifically. They are good for buttonholes and flower crowns, because they don’t wilt, as well as for fresh petal confetti. They are small-headed and fiddly to pick, though, so I’d say have some, but don’t sow masses and masses and expect the flowers to fill a great deal of space. They are easy as pie to grow, though, and very satisfying for a new grower.

  Nigella

  The classic tall blue Nigella damascena (love-in-a-mist) is called ‘Miss Jekyll’, or you could try the white Nigella papillosa ‘African Bride’, with its large sprays of sharply dissected foliage. The flowers also make dramatic seedheads, which are useful in floristry too. Nigella isn’t a wilty flower either, so it too is useful for flower crowns and buttonholes.

  Nigella papillosa ‘African Bride’ – a gorgeous, strong, white variety. Sow a patch in autumn and a patch in late winter, and you’ll have a good supply in early summer.

  Sweet peas

  Sweet peas earn a special place here, and not only because they’re my favourite flower. I’d imagine that one of the reasons you might want to grow your own wedding flowers in the first place, if you’re being married in the summer, is because you can then have a plentiful crop of sweet peas with which to scent and dress your wedding. Their scent, their frilly crêpe de Chine petals, the huge range of colours available, and the fact that they’re very easy to grow, make them an obvious choice. Buying sweet peas at market can be difficult: they may not be fresh enough, and may have been treated with silver nitrate to stop them going over quickly, which will stop their wonderful scent.

  Sweet peas can be massed on their own, or used as scented frilly filler in bouquets and posies. I think they’re so wonderful that you could grow nothing but sweet peas for your wedding, and just have them massed in bowls and jugs about the place. However, if you’re a beginner gardener, I wouldn’t advise planning a sweet-pea-only wedding scheme, because if for any reason they fail, you won’t have back-up. If you find that your sweet-pea crop is spectacularly in flower in time for your wedding, then you could have just armfuls of sweet peas about the place, and nothing else. But even then, if you have a lovely crop of ammi majus, some roses,
sweet Williams and alchemilla, I’ll bet you want to mix them up, at least in your bride’s and bridesmaids’ bouquets.

  Sweet pea ‘Mollie Rilstone’ – perfect for a ballet-shoe-pink scheme.

  People often do buy a mass of sweet peas from me to have posied in jam jars down the dining tables at weddings, and it does look lovely and smell delicious to have that as a very simple scheme. If you’re determined to have a sweet-pea-only scheme, then do look for a local grower who’ll be prepared to supply you with some extra stems in case yours aren’t in full flower yet. If you want to use jam jars, for sweet-pea-only posies on tables, you’ll need about 15 stems per jar.

  This is sweet pea ‘Raspberry Ripple’, an unusual red flake sweet pea, which I love mixed in with lots of other pink, white and red varieties.

  The following are, I think, the best sweet peas for weddingy colours. They are all Spencer varieties, which have bigger heads and more heads per stem than the grandiflora or heritage varieties. Although the Spencers are less highly scented, they still have a scent to knock over your guests with its gorgeousness.

  ‘Betty Maiden’ – almost white, with a pale bluey-lilac edging

  ‘Charlie’s Angel’ – a strong, pale lilac