Ammi visnaga
This stronger-stemmed ammi (than its cousin ammi majus) takes all summer to come to flower. You might want make a couple of little sowings, in order to ensure you’ll have some. Sow the first batch at the end of spring, and the second a month later, in early summer. If you do sow in early summer (as I recommend for an autumn wedding), make sure to keep watering the seed after sowing, to encourage speedy germination and growth. I’ve been cutting an ammi visnaga crop sown in early summer this year since mid autumn, but it’s a slow plant to get going, and I admit I’ve been cutting it before the flowers have ever properly come out. If I’d watered the seed more when I sowed it, I’d have more flowers now, as the seed would have sprouted more quickly.
“BRIDE OR GROOM?”
The bride stands on the left of the groom, and her family and guests behind her on the left, because in the olden days the groom would need to keep his sword hand free in case of attack, and his sword hand was more often his right hand than his left. The association of women with the left-hand side continues with the phrase ‘the distaff line’. The distaff was the hand-held spinner used to spin thread for weaving, which women would habitually hold, when they weren’t doing other chores, in their left hand, and so the distaff line means the maternal side of a family. In old family pictures women are generally seen standing on the left-hand side.
Bells of Ireland
This is great for an amazingly hardy late-season crop. Direct-sow the seed in early summer for an autumn flowering. I love the way it will keep on cropping from side shoots, which curl up strongly to take the place of early cutting. Bells of Ireland is an incredibly hard worker in the cut-flower patch, and in a season when there might be less greenery than you’d like, it’s useful just for its colour as much as for its interesting structure and shape. It can suffer from mildew and rust if the roots are very dry, so do water through the hotter months – though, as the season closes, you might find you get enough rain to keep the rust at bay.
California poppies
Sown in early summer, California poppies will flower strongly in the autumn, giving you delicate additions to your bouquets and posies. The foliage is very pretty in bouquets too, although it can be brittle, so be careful when handling it. California poppies flower and go over in a heartbeat, so don’t plan your whole scheme around them, but do make the most of these delicate flowers with their satin-skirt-panel petals when you can.
This bride wanted bright bright bright autumn colours in her bouquet, and the perfect orange of this California poppy was just right for her.
Cosmos
Providing an abundant source of big, daisy-shaped flowers, cosmos will flower until the first frosts. In all kinds of colours, from pure white to dark cranberry via yellow and orange and pink-edged white, with doubles and shell shapes to ring the changes as you go, cosmos is easy to grow and satisfying to cut. You could do a whole wedding scheme with just cosmos in the early autumn. (However, I say never put all your eggs in one basket: the year you grow nothing else, your cosmos will of course suffer from some nasty blight; you’ll find you’ve sown the wrong colour; it’ll all get mildew . . .)
Cosmos ‘Purity’ in a ball of flowers above a church porch.
It’s not all easy-peasy with cosmos, though. To have an abundance of flowers on your wedding day, you must cut the flowers from the day your cosmos starts flowering. And you must feed your plants: they’ll get rust and mildew if you expect them to perform for months on end. And sow your seed late: in early summer rather than spring. Then your plants will start flowering in late summer rather than high summer and will be in good condition for cutting in autumn. You can’t really expect annuals to keep producing big quantities of high-quality flowers for more than about 6 weeks, so sow your cosmos late and don’t worry about not having any flowers in high summer, because you’ll have lots for your big day.
Feverfew
Feverfew will flower right through to the first frosts. Sow seed in the ground in midsummer for a late-season crop. Look at the lovely double feverfew ‘Tetrawhite’ as an alternative to the classic, simple, yellow-centred daisy shape. You may be using lots of seedheads and foliage in your arrangements, but you’ll still need filler, and a little patch of feverfew will do this for you.
Late sunflowers
For the autumn wedding, so long as you indulge in a lot of careful watering and feeding through the summer, there’s no reason why you can’t have quite a lot of different annuals, including that stalwart of the high and late summer, the sunflower. The skill, as I’ve said throughout this chapter, is to sow your seed almost so late that you don’t believe a single flower will come up. A neighbour of mine here in Somerset has had an incredible field of sunflowers this autumn, and the seed wasn’t drilled in until mid July. While my ageing sunflower plants were collapsing under the weight of their many-times-cut-from trunks, their flowers dotted with botrytis and their stems grey with mildew, my neighbour’s grew and budded up and flowered all through mid autumn, when I would have given my right arm for such a crop.
But, as I’ve been stressing throughout this book, with annuals there is no guarantee how quickly they’ll flower, or how long they’ll keep flowering before going over. So make a few sowings of sunflowers, two or three times over a period of perhaps 6 weeks, and you’ll have lots for your wedding. For an autumn wedding, sow right at the start of summer, again in midsummer, and again a couple of weeks later, and do be sure to water the seed in well, to ensure speedy germination and strong growth.
You can pinch out the growing tips to encourage side shoots, which will give you more, if smaller, flower heads: you’re growing for wedding flowers, so I doubt you’ll be looking for one single half-metre-wide flower head when you could have many smaller blooms to use in your bouquets. See Chapter 6, for more advice on growing sunflowers.
Top tips for autumn wedding flowers
Five reliable flowers I’d recommend for autumn are ammi visnaga, dahlias, chrysanthemums, nerine lilies and schizostylis.
Beware the first frosts. If you’d like flowers for your wedding, you need to book a date before your garden is likely to freeze.
Be opportunistic with autumn berries and seedheads. Take what the season offers you and make the most of it.
Autumn foliage and berries will do better if conditioned in water than if not: berries lose their shine, shrivel up, and drop fairly quickly without water.
Don’t let your garden feel all end-of-seasony and let it go over. Keep the plants in your borders cut, fed and watered, and you’ll be surprised how your flowering perennials go on giving.
AN AUTUMN WEDDING IN A SEASIDE VICTORIAN HOUSE
This wedding took place in a wonderful house on the north Somerset coast. The venue is a bit of a ‘wedding factory’, with different couples using it for their celebrations most days of the week, especially over the weekend. We couldn’t deliver the flowers before 10am on the Saturday, and the ceremony itself was booked for 2pm. If you’re planning on doing your own flowers in a hired venue, it’s really important to check what time the venue will let you arrive. You won’t have time to do much floristry on the day of the wedding itself, so keep the plan relatively simple, so you can manage the time you have easily. We did these flowers the day before the first frost, when all the dahlias were bitten off. Lucky bride! Note that there are roses in the mix as well as dahlias, blackberries, crab apples, and so on. We knew that the frost was coming, and so we cut everything in the garden to use for this bride’s day.
We made the most of the last of the garden roses for the focal piece created for the registrar’s ceremony table, which was then moved to the top table at the reception.
The groom, the ushers and the fathers of the bride and groom all had little bunches of crab apples as part of their buttonholes.
This generous jam-jar posy filled the centre of the table at the reception. The bride scattered pine cones and ivy leaves around the tables too, to finish her autumnal look.
The bride’s bouquet was collared with bright foliage from a maple tree, and we used late clover foliage too, to give the bouquet a meadow feel.
The bride and bridesmaids too had crab apples in their bouquets and posies. Will you have fruit in the gardens you pick from, which you can use in your arrangements?
With the sun low, the light was strong in this glass-framed room, and the bright colours showed up well, whereas paler colours would have been bleached out.
You will have to abandon all thoughts of roses or peonies or dahlias, and focus on what can be grown through months with low, low light levels, and perhaps under cover. A greenhouse or polytunnel are useful tools for a winter wedding. But, for me, it is the exquisite dot of light in a painting that makes the image breathtaking, and so it will be for you in winter: windowsills garlanded with greenery and dotted with pillar candles; a bride’s bouquet made entirely from hedgerow bounty, with perhaps just a few forced paperwhite narcissi, very early ranunculus or anemones you’ve grown in a warm greenhouse; or a handful of hellebores and lungwort framed with ivy berries and early shoots of honeysuckle. (If you want to use candles, do check in advance whether your venue allows open flames. And, of course, bear in mind fire risk when combining candles with dried plant material in arrangements.)
An arrangement of mostly foliage and foraged berries, with just a few greenhouse ranunculus and the addition of candles, makes a very effective table centrepiece.
A winter bride’s bouquet with Cornish anemones, ranunculus and paperwhites, with ordinary garden ivy and berries, viburnum and other winter foliage.
Hellebores make wonderful flowers for winter arrangements, but wait until the seed pods are just beginning to set before using them, if you want the flowers to last.
Hellebore tip
For cut hellebores to last in water, they need to have begun to set seed on the most open flower in the spray. Before then, hellebores will last only a matter of hours in water. Once the seed has begun to set they hold very well, even out of water, so make pretty additions to buttonholes or flower crowns, or as single flowers tucked into the bride’s hair.
Base your winter wedding around foliage, with a deal of clever lighting, and you may not need to grow any flowers at all. With access to an ivy-hanging wood (permission granted of course), you could simply garland yourself, your intended, the tables and even your guests. Use stone, wood, moss and berries, and your wedding table centres can be made into beautiful miniature gardens. Of course, you could pot up scented narcissi to grow into table centrepieces – or dig up clumps of snowdrops and put them into cups and saucers for an unusual look. If your hellebores flower early (we have them from late winter onwards, here in southwest England), then they too can be used in your scheme.
A cushion of paperwhites in a pedestal glass vase is beautifully scented as well as enchanting to look at.
Winter weddings are a time to use your initiative and be adventurous with the finds you make when foraging. It’s no good looking at rule books when growing your own for this time of year. Questions like “Where will the focus flower go?” are especially irrelevant now. Be clever and creative, and enjoy yourself. And, if you do find that you need more flowers than you’re able to provide yourself, you should be able to find a local professional grower to supply winter flowers to supplement your own stock (see Resources section).
What’s in the garden already?
Evergreens, of course: pine, ivy, euonymus. Lichen-covered boughs, pussy willow, hazel catkins, dried hydrangea heads, grasses, winter-hardy perennial euphorbias (be careful when handling: see Chapter 3) . . . Avoid being too prescriptive about what each table centre must look like. Don’t expect every pew-end to be exactly the same as its neighbour. This is not the season to be too matchy-matchy.
Perhaps surprisingly, winter-flowering shrubs offer some delectable scents: sweet box, winter-flowering viburnums, winter-flowering honeysuckle – all have tiny flowers with such an intense fragrance that a tiny sprig dotted into each bouquet or posy will scent the whole wedding venue. Rosemary too makes a lovely scented extra ingredient in winter wedding floristry. I’m often asked to include a little rosemary in a wedding bouquet in memory of a beloved family member who has died, so it can give meaning as well as scent to your day.
Viburnum bodnantense has a gorgeous scent in winter.
Wild berries and seedheads
One of the early signs that I was going to take up flower farming for a living one day occurred at the offices of American Vogue in Paris, where I was working at the time. I was about 25 years old, and in deep awe of my boss, Susan Train, and so when people sent giant trays of macaroons, their whole new make-up collection, or bottles of champagne for her to try, I was never surprised: I’d have sent her these things too. But the best gift I think I ever saw was a huge, shallow basket filled only with ivy berries and very dark purple tulips (which I know now were probably ‘Queen of Night’), sent to her by Karl Lagerfeld via the florist Moulié, around the corner from the office. The design was simple and extremely effective, and it was the ivy flowers that provided the bouncing life to the design, rather than the rather stiff – though stunning – tulips.
Your garden in winter is full of such life: flowering ivy berries; budding cones on pine boughs; sturdy leaves on evergreens; shiny black sloes and bright pink-and-orange spindle berries in the hedgerow; old man’s beard still trailing along, just asking to be cut. When I teach floristry in the winter, people often say “But there’s nothing in the garden at this time of year.” People tend to stand near the back door, unwilling to go out into the cold unless they know their trip will be rewarded, and they look at their garden from this distance, and see no enchanting detail. The photograph above isn’t great (winter light is very hard to photograph in), but it shows a totally foraged posy, with twigs, leaves and berries. The ingredients, to give you an idea of what’s possible, are as follows:
hawthorn berries
dogwood leaves (yellow)
lichen-covered apple twig
winter-flowering honeysuckle
dried Spiraea x billardii heads
wild iris seedheads
hogweed seedheads
willow
rose hips.
Spindle berries bursting out of a winter bouquet: bright buttons of pink and orange colour lighting up the gloom.
This foraged winter bouquet of twigs, berries and coloured leaves is full of colour and texture.
What to grow
If you have a bit of greenhouse space, a warm tunnel, or even space in the house with good natural light, then you have room to force bulbs for a winter wedding, or have ranunculus and anemones flowering early. One year I grew a whole crop of amaryllis in mushroom crates in my warm, sunny bathroom – slightly invasive for the rest of my family, but I was pleased with the results.
Bulbs for forcing
There are all kinds of bulbs that will force nicely for a winter wedding. From huge-headed amaryllis to tiny, delicate snowdrops and crocuses, via gloriously scented hyacinths and delicious bobbing heads of paper-white narcissi, you could easily build your winter wedding scheme around forced bulbs.
Order your bulbs from a reputable online supplier in the middle of summer (when they will have great stock and won’t have run out of your choices). Tell the supplier when you’d like them delivered – if you don’t, then you’re likely to get the bulbs in high summer, which might be too early for your purposes. Also ask their advice about the best time to pot up the bulbs to have them ready for your wedding date. Bulb suppliers are full of useful knowledge and love to share their expertise, and you’ll get much better information from them than from your local garden centre, which might be selling bulbs, but which will not necessarily have very expert sales assistants.
The delivery date for your bulbs is important, because it’s better that they are kept in the bulb supplier’s cool, damp-free storage, than that you have to try to create the optimum storage conditions until you
’re ready to plant them.
For forcing, make sure you order bulbs that have been ‘prepared’: this means that they’ve already been given a cold snap to trick them into thinking that winter is over, and you can pot them up and start growing them straight away.
You’ll need to be able to heat your greenhouse a little, or be prepared to bring flowers inside the house to hurry them up – so plant in trays or pots that aren’t so large they’re too heavy to lift. You can move them in and out of the warm in order to encourage quicker flowering or to slow the process down, depending on the weather or how hot your house is. In general, unless you need to hurry them up, keep potted bulbs in a frost-free environment, perhaps at about 12°C (54°F) or just above, to bring them on.
Bulbs for forcing need not be planted deeply. Narcissi, hyacinths and amaryllis can be placed so that half the bulb stands free of the surface of the compost. We make bulb-forcing compost using a mix of 50 per cent horticultural grit and 50 per cent municipal green-waste compost, which makes for good drainage. If you’re growing a great many to cut, then you could think about using recycled mushroom-growing trays as growing containers.
Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 11