The bride asked for a ball of flowers to hang from the oak tree over the tables. This takes more material than you might think, but is fun to do and looks brilliant.
Extra buttonholes were popped into small, square jars around the tables. They were pinned at the back, so that people could wear them if they liked.
This is a loosely arranged jam-jar posy, with about 12 flower stems just popped into the jar. You need more stems to make a little hand-tied posy – which I prefer, because it looks more luxurious as well as being easier to transport.
This is a jam-jar posy which has been tied. It uses more stems, and is more luxurious looking, than the loosely arranged stems shown above. I like this version – but you must do what you wish!
The groom’s buttonhole posy, with one white sweet pea, a yellow rudbeckia, and underneath it all a tiny supporting ledge of ammi visnaga.
A posy hung on a gate showed the guests which way to go to find the party.
The bride’s bouquet had cream satin ribbon and also a lovely salmon-pink grosgrain ribbon, reflecting some of the colours in the flowers – and the colour of the wine.
The bride’s bouquet was put in a vase to keep it fresh during the festivities. The colours of the flowers were bright, the orchard was beautiful, and so the couple sensibly stuck to plain white napery for their scheme.
Choose a date before you usually get your first frost. Your garden flowers will keep performing until then.
Here at Common Farm in Somerset, we often get a ground frost in the second week in October. Until then I’m (relatively) confident that we’ll have a mass of dahlias and other garden goodies for use in our floristry. After that, and there’s a good chance that we’ll have slim pickings. True, the garden usually gives us dahlias until just late autumn, but not in the profusion we have until the first frost, and a month before that they’re often looking a little tired.
So, for an autumn wedding, think outside the box: think wreathing, think fruit, think foliage and seedheads. The flowers you have can be the highlights in a wild mix of foraged leaves, nuts and apples. This is a time to perhaps be less prescriptive, and more imaginative about the colours and flowers you choose for your wedding scheme.
Here the colours are rather an unexpected combination: this is what happens when you’re making the most of what’s left in the garden. Sunflowers will bloom late into the autumn from a late sowing in high summer, but they can begin to look pinched as the nights get cooler.
It is the foliage which makes this mix so stunning: the lemon-yellow leaves of the hornbeam contrasting beautifully with the dark red of the smoke tree.
What’s in the garden already?
Well really it’s the time for foliage to sing, rather than flowers. Do you have scarlet oak? Sweet gum? Maples? Will there be hawthorn berries and sloes; old man’s beard? Are there silver pennies of honesty seedheads for you to tuck into your posies and bouquets?
Remember the necessary stem-count described in Chapter 1: approximately 600 stems. So do you think you’ll be able to make up a good third of your stem-count, or maybe a lot more than that, with foliage and seedheads?
A seedhead scheme with fruit. Something to think about, or perhaps to inspire you, if you’re thinking of an autumn wedding.
Cutting and conditioning autumn foliage
With late-season tree and shrub foliage, the risk is more that they’ll drop than that they’ll wilt. You don’t need to sear the stems as you do in earlier seasons, but keeping cut stems in water will help stop the leaves drying out and dropping. And if leaves do drop, don’t worry: it’s the season for falling leaves! Use coloured leaves to scatter about the tablescapes at your reception. They will add a lovely hue and will reflect the garden outside beautifully. Of course, seedheads and twigs need no water, but berries will need water if you intend them to keep their bright shininess for more than a day or so.
Flowering perennials
As the summer comes to a close, deadhead and feed your flowering perennials to keep them producing flowers, and to prevent the appearance of unsightly rust or mildew. People often relax towards the end of summer and just watch their gardens go over, as is normal for the season. Keep your garden deadheaded and fed, and you may be surprised at how long your plants keep producing new shoots of glorious colour.
I recommend you make use of all the flowering perennials available to you. You don’t know when the first frost will strike, and unless you’ve been very careful to set your wedding date well in advance of any frost risk, the skill is to be not too fussy about your colour palette, and work with what you have. I find that this end-of-season floristry forces me to be really creative with my work, and, as a result, the arrangements I make are much more visually exciting than with the lovely, much-easier-to-create-with flowers of late spring and summer.
Do you have asters in the gardens you can cut from? These gorgeous autumn daisy shapes make a great filler for posies and bouquets. They flower until the first frosts – as do penstemons, and late-season persicarias. Scabious will already have flowered, but when they look very seedheady (in late summer), cut them back, give them a feed (chicken-poo pellets will work well), and they’ll re-shoot for you. Even if they’re not in full flower, budding scabious is very pretty in posies and buttonholes.
Late-season persicarias giving a flash of deep pinkish-red to a bouquet filled with the last of the ammi majus, hawthorn berries, dark red elder foliage . . .
Equally, delphiniums often have a second flush through till the first frosts. At the time of writing, at the very end of autumn, we still have a few in our garden, and we’re still cutting them, though I would use them only opportunistically in a wedding scheme: I wouldn’t be brave enough to make them the focus of wedding flowers this late in the season. Cut them back after their first flowering, feed, water and hope for the best.
Delphiniums in late autumn? Don’t rely on them, but if they’re there, use them!
Achillea flowers on and on for us, right up until the first frosts. Achillea at Common Farm is often the favourite home for a late hatch of greenfly, but you can rub off the greenfly easily enough and still use the flower heads.
Wildflowers and berries
There are seedheads to be found all over the place at this time of year: wild carrot, hogweed (be careful cutting hogweed, as the spiny stems can cause a severe skin reaction, so wear gloves) and scabious seedheads are all structural and interesting in arrangements. Look also for hedgerow berries: hawthorn has a lovely rich red berry, blackthorn will be laden with sloes (though be careful here too, as it’s very spiny), and there are blackberries and crab apples; wild dogwood berries and wild iris berries. Look at the wild spaces available to you more closely at this time of year – from a distance, it may appear that there’s nothing to cut.
What to grow
Dahlias, chrysanthemums, late annuals, and late-flowering bulbs such as nerine lilies and schizostylis make for a deliciously rich-coloured look when mixed with turning autumn foliage, berries and fruit. As with any season for which you might be growing, take time to do a little research into what might do well for you in your growing conditions.
I find that this end-of-season floristry forces me to be really creative with my work, and, as a result, the arrangements I make are much more visually exciting than with the lovely, much-easier-to-create-with flowers of late spring and summer.
Chrysanthemums
No chapter on autumn weddings would be complete without mentioning this classic of the autumn border. Like dahlias, chrysanthemums are enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity, and people are discovering the gorgeous shapes and colours you can grow. Banish their sometimes doleful reputation, and think instead of how they can give you a trusty understorey to your flowers. Use chrysanthemums to make structural shapes; for green flowers; for daisy sprays of little white blooms.
Order young, rooted cuttings early in the year from a reliable source (see Resources section) and pot them up when they arr
ive. You can find amazing displays of chrysanths at large horticultural shows, even early in the season. We bought our first collection when we saw them at the Malvern Show in late spring, and they flowered beautifully for us that autumn. If you have greenhouse or polytunnel space at your disposal once the weather starts to cool, I’d recommend keeping the young plants potted up (and fed and watered) outdoors through the summer months while they grow on, remembering to pinch out flowering tips as they appear, to encourage bushing up and lots of flowering stems. Then, when the temperature starts to drop, you can bring them under cover and they’ll flower well into the late autumn.
If you don’t have space under cover, then try to plant your chrysanthemums in a sheltered patch in the garden, not only to prevent them being pinched by cold, but also to protect them from battering by wind. You want your wedding flowers to be perfect, not wind-lashed and weather-bruised.
Chrysanthemums will respond well to regular feeding with a weak seaweed solution. They can get powdery mildew in a wet spell, dry mildew if their roots dry out, leggy if not cut hard enough . . . they are, I find, a little fussy. (But then, they might not love it as much in our damp, dank autumn conditions here in Somerset as they might somewhere a little sunnier and drier.) We did use both red and white chrysanths in an unusual habit, their extraordinary colours, and their fabulous mix of shapes and sizes autumn wedding scheme last year, and mixed with anemones, paperwhite narcissi, schizostylis and greenery they did look great – and the bride loved them. So do think about chrysanthemums for an autumn wedding: if you have a protected spot, it might be well worth trying some.
This bride chose red and white for her late-autumn scheme, and the late-season chrysanthemums were very effective with schizostylis and other seasonal goodies.
Dahlias
Dahlias will flower until the first sharp frost, after which they are not to be trusted. But, if your wedding date is before you’re likely to have a proper frost, then do plan to use dahlias in your scheme. Their wild dancing make them my second-favourite garden flower (after sweet peas, which stole my heart long before I’d ever even heard of the dahlia). Dahlias will start flowering from high summer, and to have them in tip-top condition for an autumn wedding you’ll need to keep deadheading and feeding them fortnightly with a weak seaweed solution.
A late-autumn bouquet with dahlias and dark elder foliage.
Order your dahlias from reputable suppliers, and they will arrive in mid spring as rooted cuttings. By the end of the season these tiny cuttings will have grown and grown to be nearly 1.5m (4-5’) high, and 1m (3’) wide, loaded with gorgeous, cuttable flowers. See Chapter 6, for more on ordering and growing dahlias, but for an autumn wedding you might want to think differently about colour. As the year turns, the light seems to make the colours in each dahlia petal richer and more varied: a dark red dahlia in high summer may appear flat in colour, even bland, but by autumn those plain-coloured petals will have morphed into stripes you couldn’t see before – more vibrant variations on a theme. So when you choose dahlias for your wedding, think of what will go well with your autumn foliage; with the fruit and nuts you might add in to the mix. Be imaginative. For the autumn-wed couple, growing your own wedding flowers offers the richest possibilities in wild colour combinations. Go on, I dare you!
This pedestal arrangement has late-season foliage, rich dark dahlias, pink cosmos, trails of amaranthus . . . An arrangement like this needs about 75 stems of foliage and flowers and could be used to frame the ceremony, then be moved to make a focal piece at the reception.
Bulbs
Bulbs aren’t just for spring: there is a good selection for flowers in autumn. They all take a while to clump up and make a really good show, but if you’re growing them actually for your wedding, each bulb should give you at least one flower, so you can plan in advance for the number of stems you need. Nerines and schizostylis flower for a good, long time in the garden, and, unlike in the summer months, when a flower can go over in a matter of days when the sun is high on its head, autumn flowers should last longer on the plant. Ask your bulb supplier for specific advice on growing autumn bulbs (see Resources section for recommendations).
Acidanthera
An early-autumn flowerer, this white gladiolus with its dark-plum-coloured middle has a glorious, intense scent, which can be overpowering if you use too many of them in bouquets and posies for indoors. The bulbs are cheap, but not very hardy, so they’re unlikely to overwinter well. Here in the relatively warm south-west of England, I plant acidanthera anew every year, as very few re-emerge each spring.
Plant in mid spring, in a hot, dry place, and enjoy the flowers when they come. They can be unreliable flowerers – ours didn’t flower at all the year before last, and patchily this year, despite our buying bulbs from an extremely reliable supplier, so it’s perhaps wise to not plan for acidanthera to play a major role in your wedding flowers. But just one, in your bride’s bouquet, is heaven, and very unusual.
Crocosmia
After vibrant flowers through high-to-late summer, you’re left with the most fantastic curving fronds of seedheads. Use them in taller arrangements, in jugs and baskets. Autumn is a time of rich pickings for seedheads, but crocosmia is one of my favourites.
Nerine lilies
The burst of pink from a nerine lily can be the theme colour for your scheme. I love the way these late-season flowers really take you by surprise, as they look like the sort of thing that would flower earlier in the year. But throughout the autumn you find these glorious pink lilies flourishing (in hot, protected, dry beds); bursting colour through the gloom. My own wedding bouquet was cut entirely from the garden and hedgerow one morning in late autumn: my mother created a bouquet of one nerine lily, old man’s beard, blackberries, purple dogwood leaves, acorns and oak leaves. I loved it, and wish I had a better photograph to share here, but I was very keen not to spend any money on my wedding (we needed to save every penny for Common Farm), and so didn’t even have a photographer, other than family members taking happy snaps.
This bouquet of the last dark dahlias has shoots of bright pink nerine lilies coming out in it. They’ll stop the dark dahlias looking too gloomy in the late-season light.
Paperwhite narcissi
Narcissi might be a surprising idea for an autumn wedding, but they will reward you with tiny scented stars just 6 weeks from planting. So when you’re clearing space in early autumn, pop a hundred or so paper-whites into the ground, and they’ll be up and in flower for you in no time. They won’t have enormously long stems, but they’re perfect for posies, have a wonderful scent, and it’s as though there’s a magic wand of spring pinging up all over the place, taking away the threat of winter.
Early paperwhites in a scheme with the last of the opportunistically cut roses. An unusual mixture, and full of scent.
Schizostylis
These delicate shoots of redder pinks than nerines will grow in damp soil and clump up to make great little fronds of autumn colour. If you plant them in the spring of the very year of your wedding, you won’t get many more flowers than the number of bulbs you plant, but if someone you know has some already established in their garden, then do beg them to allow you to cut them, as they add life and vibrancy to a late-season look.
The schizostylis here is used for the fieriness of its pink when put with dark reds and oranges. With whites and paler tones, this little lily seems a gentler colour.
Budgeting tip
The further you go from a big city, the less expensive your venue will be. Large country houses are increasingly available to hire from Friday to Sunday, and often have accommodation for up to 70 people. If you would rather celebrate with lots of friends than have lots of presents, you could ask guests to contribute to a country-house weekend instead of buying from a wedding list – giving you a Downton-type experience without a bank-breaking cost.
Annuals for a late-season show
To have annuals flowering in really good condition through
the autumn you need to sow your seed late: that’s high-summer late. For the usual summer show, it’s counter-intuitive to be seeding ground so far into the season – but you’re being clever, and planning for plants to be in first-class condition much later. Prepare your ground so that it’s a clean, fine tilth, and sow your seed sparingly, as you would earlier in the season.
Now, your challenge is to get the flowers germinating, growing and flowering – and the trick is to water. This seed will germinate and try to flower very quickly, so it might not get its roots down so far in the search for water as its older sisters, sown in spring, would do. The summer months can be dry, and you’re looking for quick germination and good growth before a late show of flowers. This year we sowed seed in the middle of summer and it flowered before the end of the season. If we’d watered it more (I am mean with water), we’d have got a better show, but we already had a good gardenful of flowers, and sowed so late really as an experiment. If you’re sowing for a wedding, then you will doubtless take better care and pay more attention, and you’ll get a better crop than we did.
Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 10