‘Daily Mail’ – hot salmony pink: good for a stronger colour scheme
‘Mollie Rilstone’ – pale cream with ballet-shoe-pink edging
‘Royal Wedding’ – pure white.
When to sow your annuals
Early-summer weddings are lovely, but I recommend a bit of hedge-betting to ensure success in having all the annual flowers you’ve dreamed of. Unless you have very hard winters, then in early autumn the previous year, direct-sow half the patch you have at your disposal with a row each of your hardy annuals. You can thin those seedlings in the spring (winter may have thinned them enough for you in the meantime, so don’t thin them in the autumn), when the little overwintered seedlings will begin to pounce into life. (The only flower I wouldn’t direct-sow is the sweet pea, which is often the victim of a greedy mouse, and which I always sow in mouse-protected trays.) You can sow the same seed in seed trays, and again in late winter, to germinate under cover. This way, whatever the weather through winter and spring, you’ll have success. See Chapter 2, for further advice on seed sowing, including timing and spacing recommendations.
A posy made up of mostly hardy annuals direct-sown the previous autumn.
For the same reason – that you won’t be able to guarantee your weather – and also an insurance in case you lose any seedlings to slugs, etc., it pays to also sow successionally in the spring: several times, 3 or 4 weeks apart. This way you can be sure to have flowers in bloom at exactly the right time for your wedding.
Floristry tip
To arrange a selection of flowers in a shallow glass dish like this one, make a grid of narrow tape across the top of the vase and pop each stem, cut relatively short, into the spaces between the tape. This will prevent the heavy heads of the flowers from pulling themselves out of the vase.
A handful of about 20 sweet-pea stems arranged in a small pedestal vase.
Biennials
Sown as seed the previous summer, biennials start to flower in late spring. So if you’re to be married in late spring or early summer, and you know your date a year in advance, then you’ll have time to pop in some sweet Williams, sweet rocket and foxgloves, say, for your big day.
Sow in seed trays in early summer, prick out the seedlings into individual pots when they’re big enough to handle, and plant out in their flowering position in early autumn.
I’ve listed the following three biennials here because they’re my favourites, but you could equally include wallflowers or Icelandic poppies, for example. Even parsley makes a lovely biennial cut flower, with gorgeous lemon-yellow umbellifer flower heads.
This mix of early-summer flowers cut for a wedding includes sweet Williams and foxgloves. Foxgloves may well contort themselves into interesting shapes once cut. Do be careful with them: they are poisonous and you shouldn’t let children handle them.
Foxgloves
These make great cut flowers, with height and bells to suit any colour scheme. I love ‘Pam’s Choice’, white with dark pink freckles inside it; or ‘Sutton’s Apricot’, a gorgeous pale peach, very fresh in a spring colour mix. Foxglove seed is arguably the smallest I’ll sow in any year, and Ann, who works with us, swears that you’re always better off broadcasting the seed into the ground and making the most of what comes up. I prefer to be a little more certain, and while it’s really difficult to sow foxglove seed thinly enough in trays, when the seed does germinate, the seedlings are tough enough to be pricked out quite early, and they’ll then grow on into sturdy little plants ready for tucking into the ground in their flowering positions in the autumn.
If you’re growing a garden in which to hold your wedding reception, as well as flowers for the arrangements, then foxgloves give your borders great height and structure for early summer. And if you cut the tall stems for floristry, then they’ll carry on flowering for you on side shoots for several months. Remember that foxgloves take a lot of space on the ground, so don’t crowd them in with other flowers, or the others risk being mulched out of existence by the foxgloves’ large, heavy, flat leaves.
Foxglove ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ is one of my absolute favourites and a lovely bridal colour – ballet-shoe pink.
Sweet rocket
One of my favourite garden flowers, sweet rocket sports tall stems with sweetly scented white or lilac-coloured flowers bunched at the top. The flowering stems are a similar shape to lilac, or phlox, or paniculate hydrangeas. Sweet rocket will shoot more delicate flowers from smaller side stems and keep flowering for months. If it likes your soil, it will self-seed happily about the place and you’ll have it popping up for years, reminding you, when it flowers, of the happy time when you were married. For weddings; for parties; for every day – a garden with sweet rocket flowering in it is a happy place.
Sweet Williams
Foxgloves give you spikes of height, sweet rocket gives you frothy lilac shapes, but sweet William gives you lovely plates of gently scented flowers on good strong stems that will last 2 weeks in water. Sweet William gives great bang for your buck, because the flower heads take up lots of space in floristry, so if you’re looking for something that will really fill your arrangements and perhaps help you keep your overall stem-count down, then home-grown sweet William is the perfect choice.
Sweet William ‘Auricula-Eyed Mixed’ will give you lots of different colours, including this gorgeous deep pink.
Top tips for early-summer wedding flowers
However tempting the endless choice of annuals you could grow, try to keep the number of types of flower you sow down to about five or seven: this will give your bouquets and posies a consistent ‘look’ (as well as making it easier when it comes to counting the stems you need to cut).
Direct-sow half your seed in the ground in autumn, and sow the rest in trays under cover in late winter. This way you hedge your bets and can beat the weather, whatever it throws at you.
But never sow sweet-pea seed direct into the ground! Mice love to eat the seed, so sow it in deep trays, and keep it protected from mice until the seedlings are well established.
Remember that sappy early-season growth may look wilty when you cut it. Give your material plenty of time to condition in a cool, airy place out of direct sunlight, and it should bounce back nicely.
If you know your wedding date at least a year in advance, do sow some biennial seed: early summer is the time for biennials, and they offer some gorgeous shapes and colours to use in your floristry.
AN EARLY-SUMMER WEDDING IN AN ELIZABETHAN MANOR HOUSE
The venue for this event was an old, old house in Gloucestershire. We used the structures the house and garden gave us for inspiration for hanging flowers and garlands, and we imagined the flowers against the colour of the stone. We used Victorian preserving jars (grand jam jars!) for masses of little posies about the place.
The ceremony was held in the dark, panelled hall of the house, and afterwards the guests were invited to a reception in a marquee on the lawn. All the posies were moved from the ceremony to the tables in the marquee, and the larger arrangements were moved to frame the marquee entrance and dress the buffet tables. So all the flowers were used twice, except for the garlanding and the heart. Even the bride’s bouquet and the bridesmaids’ posies were used after the ceremony to dress the cake table. Nothing went to waste. The whole event was bursting with flowers. Think about where you might be able to save time and use flowers to double up: it looks lovely after a ceremony if all the guests pick up posies and carry them to the reception venue – as though every guest is carrying a bunch of flowers.
This arrangement was made for the registrar’s table: long and low, in a vintage, creamware vase, the stems are popped into a grid of tape. This stops the flowers falling over and means there’s no need for flower foam.
A grand venue like this one can have its gates garlanded, but more modest arrangements on gates and entrances – a jar hanging on a door knocker, a scattering of rose petals leading up a path – can be just as effective.
F
or a stunning focal piece, keep an eye out for a good, heavy, pedestal container – this one is a cast-iron urn which was once painted white. The arrangement is made in a pot inside the urn, with a ball of chicken wire taped firmly inside the pot to give support to the tall stems.
Here’s a Victorian preserving jar with a pretty posy in it, tied to the newel post of the staircase down which the bride made her grand entrance. After the ceremony the jar was untied and moved to dress one of the tables in the reception marquee. Waste not want not!
The bride’s bouquet was made with the strongest-coloured flowers from the patch, so that it stood out from all the other flowers. After the ceremony (and having survived being chucked into the crowd and caught by a 10-year-old boy who dropped it!), it was put in a vase of water to dress the cake table.
Group small posies together to make more of an impact. Here they are edging a stone path leading to the ceremony.
That grand focal arrangement is now placed on a glass stand (actually an upturned giant vase) so that it looks incredibly light and airy against the dark old panelling.
This is a gigantic heart made of chicken wire, bound in a greenery garland and then dressed with roses and other goodies. The flowers were arranged first in small cushions of flower foam, then wired on to the garland. A project if you have a lot of confident flowery friends to help!
A little garlanding at a wedding goes a very long way. Garland entrances, pergolas, the top table . . . it is fiddly and time-consuming, but worth doing if you have time, material, and a team of helpers to install the garlanding at the last minute. See Part Three for garlanding instructions.
White and pastel-coloured flowers can disappear in such tough conditions – especially if you plan to hold your ceremony and/or reception in an essentially white marquee.
Rich, jewel tones might be mixed into a paler base, for a bright effect to show up against white table napery or the sides of the marquee; even just against the sky. I recommend too that you look at yellow. (I hear intakes of breath from brides who’d never think of such a thing – though why yellow has such bad press in floristry I just don’t know!) Sunflowers, for example, may not be to everybody’s taste – though I adore them in wedding flowers – but do think of what they offer in colour. Even the palest bride at that time of year has good skin colour, and yellow is so sunny against happy, healthy, summer faces. And for those with really dark skins, rich, summer yellows sing like gold.
These bright-coloured buttonholes are all together in a plastic takeaway container, having a nice drink until they’re needed tomorrow. The yellow bobbles are craspedia – a great high-summer-flowering annual.
This mix is for a cheery, vintage-style wedding with jugs and jars and lively hand-tied posies. Yellow lifts a scheme – see how the yellow highlights stop the pinks and purples from being too blue.
The colours may be glorious, but this can be a tough time to be growing for. Everything depends on the season you’ve had so far: an early spring or a hot, dry spell earlier in the season can mean that the flowers you’ve been growing so carefully have gone over. The skill with growing flowers for an event at this time of year lies in late and successional sowing, and in watering and feeding. You don’t need an enormous amount of stock to do your own wedding flowers, but you do need it to be in good condition. So sow annuals little and often, from mid spring until early summer, and you will have flowers to cut. And, depending on the season so far, you’ll also have lots of greenery to use, from cutting the plants not yet in flower – or, alternatively, lovely seedheads from the flowers that have gone over already.
Hot weather at this time of year will put your flowers under pressure when it comes to cutting. Cut early in the morning or in the cool of the evening, into clean buckets of fresh water, and be sure to put them somewhere cool and airy to condition overnight before doing floristry with them. Be prepared to replace water in any glass containers on the day of the wedding, as in hot weather cut flowers can make the water dirty within hours.
This mix of jugs and jars, with sunflowers, dahlias and cosmos as the three main flowers, is all ready for an intimate wedding party. Just refresh the water in the morning and you’re away.
What’s in the garden already?
Hydrangeas. Here where we live, in the south-west of England, hydrangeas flower from the middle of summer until the first frosts: their wonderful, generous heads of flowers are a gift to the florist, from the opening of their first pale, waxy heads to those same flowers, slowly going over, maturing into richer colours – greens and purples and moody dark pinks. We can’t grow them with enormous success here at Common Farm, because our clay is a little cold for them, no matter how hard we work it. But world-class hydrangeas grow happily in the gardens of a neighbouring village only 3 miles away in Wiltshire, in what remains of the great Sel-wood Forest. I beg and borrow (but have yet to steal) hydrangeas from my friends up there, and use them in wedding schemes right up until early winter.
“But hydrangea flower heads are too big for my little posies!” I hear you cry. Cut them up; use them as filler. You don’t have to use a whole hydrangea head at a time: a little goes a very long way.
A lace-capped hydrangea used as filler in a bridesmaid’s posy.
For information on how to make flower-foam-free centrepieces like these, with hydrangeas and all the other goodies from your garden, see Part Three.
They can be difficult to condition, especially early in their flowering season. The ‘flowers’ on the heads are actually leaves, and so can be wilty, especially if you cut hydrangeas from their woody, old-season stems. We cut hydrangeas early in the morning or late in the evening, stripping foliage straight off the stem before plunging the stems straight into buckets of clean water – a matter of seconds between the cutting and getting them into water. Plus we try to cut them only on their green (current season) stems, which are younger and have better spongy cellulose cells for the flower heads to drink up. (For more on cutting and conditioning shrubby plants, see Chapter 3.) If hydrangeas really wilt, cut the stems again at a sharp angle, and lay them submerged in a bath of tepid water overnight. You’ll be amazed! Once hydrangea flowers are past that very fresh, newly unfurled moment, and they begin to mature, you shouldn’t have any problem conditioning them.
I will admit that I avoid using newly opened hydrangeas in flower-foam-based arrangements, as they don’t last long, so for a high-summer wedding I might keep the flower foam at bay where hydrangeas are concerned. But once the flowers are fully open, or even beginning to dry out, then they’re no longer so wilty, so I use them a great deal.
Other perennials and shrubs
Ordinary tree and hedgerow greenery can be beginning to look a little tired now. The fresh, zingy green of newly opened foliage has been replaced as the leaves have grown heavier, thicker, a darker green. If you’re growing your own, and have space, then bells of Ireland are a lighter, fresher green, so make a good alternative. Consider how much space you have. The alchemilla of the earlier summer will be over, but you could grow bupleurum to add that dash of bright green to your mix. Or, for silver-coloured foliage, try cineraria.
The high-summer flowers bells of Ireland, buddleja and cosmos are all used in this jugs-and-jars, blue-and-white wedding scheme.
You could even use herbs for greenery. And herbs are often beginning to flower now: mints have pretty, brush-shaped flowers in pale mauves and purples – pineapple mint is especially useful, I think, with its variegated leaves and miniature buddleja-shaped flowers. They’ll give scent to any bouquets that don’t smell so sweet as the early-summer rosses and lilac.
Pineapple mint in a high-summer bride’s bouquet. The scent is sharp and calming – good for a nervous bride.
Buddleja, often known as the butterfly bush, is a favourite of mine for cutting. It is sometimes disparaged as a weed, but with good management it will produce fine flowering shoots, which smell like honey. And, with one buddleja flower in your bouquet, you just might find
yourself walking down the aisle with a butterfly to keep you company.
Buddleja flowers are even used here in tiny ‘shot-glass posies’, arranged in vintage glasses to mark the place settings on the top table at a wedding. If you make the top table the focus for all your floristry, then the photographs will be especially flowery, as most of the photographs of the day will be taken of you.
Echinacea flowers from high summer to the first frosts. Although the delicate petals are easy to bruise, these lovely flowers can give your arrangements a really wild, shaggy look, and their tall, strong stems are good for larger, wilder-looking arrangements.
In this shot the bruised petals of a fully out echinacea flower have been removed, leaving only the bristling, thistle-like centre to the flower, a great piece of structural theatre in floristry. Just because a flower’s no longer at its best doesn’t mean it’s useless . . .
Sedum makes a great filler at this time of year – it’s a true workhorse in the cut-flower patch. From when the flower heads begin to bud up, in tight masses of silvery pinheads, to when the flowers open into great plates of butterfly-beloved flowers, stems of sedum will give strength and understorey to your posies and bouquets. And remember, while the flowers may look as though they’re too big to use in your floristry, they’re all growing on short, individual stems, so you can split them to use as you like. Also, they don’t wilt, so if you’re thinking of making buttonholes or flower crowns, sedum cut as little sprigs will be useful in supporting other flowers.
Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 8