Lacy filler In early to high summer, ammi majus is perfect. Earlier in the year it could be cow parsley; later, ammi visnaga. For winter, you might use a flowering viburnum such as Viburnum tinus ‘Eve Price’.
Spikes of delicate flowers These will give the bouquet life and movement. In early summer, it might be foxgloves or delphiniums (use the heavy-headed leading flower heads for large arrangements; the more delicate side shoots in bouquets). Earlier in the year, perhaps common bistort or aquilegia. Later, you might use larkspur or bells of Ireland. In winter you could use bright stems of dogwood or willow.
Greenery This will frame your flowers and gives a bouquet depth of field – a herbaceous-border look rather than a municipal-planting look. Look for greenery with tendrils, which can curl out from the side: clematis, sweet peas, ivy, jasmine . . .
This bouquet has alchemilla and acid-green physocarpus as greenery, to split the flowers up and give them dancing space.
Wildflowers A dot of wildflower gives any bouquet a touch of magic. In spring there are cowslips and bluebells; in summer, it could be ox-eye daisies or buttercups; later, wild scabious . . . Winter brings old man’s beard and berries like the wild spindle to give a bouquet a wild look.
Wild scabious bouncing tall in a bouquet. This one is field scabious, which will have been feeding the butterflies in the field until you cut it.
Keeping your ingredients in water
Many florists take the flowers and foliage they’re going to use and lay it all out on their counter, so they can pick flowers up easily stem by stem. But I recommend that you keep your material in its bucket and pull out stems one at a time to add to your hand-tied posy. This way you won’t give your flower stems time to dry out, or put your flower heads under any stress while you arrange them. Your material has not been treated with lots of preserving chemicals, and it will much prefer to be kept in water.
These hand-tied bouquets can take a while to make, especially if they’re your bride’s or bridesmaids’ bouquets. (I am a very experienced florist and typically it will take me over an hour to create a bride’s bouquet, while a little, relatively easy jam-jar posy will still probably take me 10 minutes or so.)
Since you’re going to keep your cut flowers in their buckets and only take them out one at a time, it’s really worth stripping the stems of any side shoots and foliage that you won’t need, before you put them in the water to condition: this way, when you pull flowers out one stem at a time, they won’t pull all the others out with them.
How to make your posy or bouquet
Use your left hand as your ‘holder’ (assuming you’re right handed), and position your left thumb and forefinger as a loose clasp. Keep your hand loose: you don’t want to grip your stems too tightly, or you risk bruising them, and then they’ll find it difficult to drink.
Use your left hand as a loose clasp and add stems at a slight angle from right to left, making a quarter turn after each time you’ve added a stem.
Take one flower to start with and put it in your hand clasp. I wouldn’t start with one of your accent flowers – the start of your posy is unlikely to end up being the centre of it. Start with some foliage, or a lighter flower.
Add new stems at an angle from top right to bottom left across the previous stem in your hand. This is beginning to make the twist which will give you a hand tie that will stand up on its own, as in the picture below. Keep your grip loose between your thumb and forefinger, so that you can add stems easily and you’re not clenching your collection of stems into a hot bunch. Every time you add a stem, take your posy out of your left hand and turn it a quarter clockwise. Add stem, quarter turn, add stem, quarter turn. (At first it’ll feel odd, and as though the angle isn’t working, but keep going!) Never mind if the stems are all different lengths hanging down: you’ll cut these off evenly at the end of the process. Look instead at the posy as you make it.
Dot different flowers and foliage in to the mix as you go along. The reason you make a quarter turn every time you add a stem is so that you arrange your flowers evenly around your posy, so that when it sits in a vase or jar as a table centre it can be enjoyed from all angles.
If you’re making a bride’s or bridesmaid’s bouquet, you could use a long mirror to see how the bouquet looks when being carried at waist height, and add trailing stems at the front or side, or taller stems at the back, if that’s the look you’d like to go for (see ‘Practice tips’ below). A mirror in the flower studio is a very useful tool.
Support delicate flowers with stronger material in your bouquet. This poppy, if properly conditioned, won’t wilt during the day, but it will probably lose its petals, leaving the pretty beginnings of its seedhead. Manage your expectations of what the flowers will do for you, and you’ll be happy with the results.
Add your stems one at a time, placing each stem so that it sits happily with its neighbour, i.e. isn’t too squashed, or falling out too loosely. Don’t use all your favourites at once, or you’ll end up with a posy very flower-jammed on one side and with just a thick collar of foliage. Dotting foliage among your flowers helps keeps the look light and informal – more ‘fresh from the garden’. It also helps to support the more delicate, potentially floppy flower heads, as well as the heavier flowers, which might otherwise pull themselves out of the bouquet and spoil the shape you’re making.
It’s sometimes difficult to get a real idea of how a posy is looking when seen only from above, so in our studio we have a mirror so that we can stand back with a bouquet or posy in our hands and see how it looks from any distance. This way we can spy any gaps that have appeared, or bald patches, or flat sides – though if you give your posy a quarter turn every time you add a stem, this shouldn’t happen.
When your posy’s big enough for you, tie it tight. (You may need somebody to help the first time you do this, as you’ll be nervous about putting it down and won’t have the confidence to manage raffia, bouquet, knotting, etc. with just your own two hands.) I really recommend a doubled-up length of raffia for tying: raffia holds well, doesn’t bruise the stems, and makes a good double knot without the raffia slipping. If you plan to use ribbon to tie your bouquet, tie it first with raffia and then cover the raffia with ribbon.
Cut the stems evenly across at the bottom, so that it looks tidy, and put your creation straight into water. Et voilà! Your posy or bouquet is made.
Cut the stems evenly across when you’ve tied your bouquet or posy and it should stand up for you like this. I recommend you get it straight into water when you’ve cut the stems, so that they keep drinking and keeping the flower heads beautiful for your big day.
Practice tips
Weekly practice will really help a lot in giving you confidence. Posy-making can appear deceptively simple when you watch someone experienced whip up a floral masterpiece in no time. If you practise, then you’ll feel a similar confidence when it comes to your wedding preparation, and you won’t find it stressful creating your real arrangements.
As you become more practised you might like to add collars of interesting greenery: try different trailing ingredients, such as jasmine or clematis.
Put your posies straight back into water when you’ve made them, and find somewhere cool, out of direct sunlight, and airy, where they can spend the night before you use them. A garage, barn or cellar is ideal.
If you’re making your bride’s bouquet, and you’re feeling confident, then have a go at giving a ‘back’ and a ‘front’ to your bouquet by standing with it in front of a full-length mirror so that you can see what it looks like as you create it. But remember that there is no such thing as a perfect bride’s bouquet, especially when it’s home-made. All happy brides are beautiful, whether their bouquets are practised confections of great artistic beauty or a fresh and simple handful gathered almost straight from the garden.
So be sensible about the time you’ll have to spend on bouquets the day before the wedding. You may only have time to do your table centres, or the cere
mony flowers, or perhaps you have a big team of obedient helpers and you’ll have time to do all the flowers. If everything’s carefully planned, then all will go well, especially if you’ve had lots of practice.
A BUTTONHOLE OR CORSAGE
Here we have a bud of Rosa ‘Compassion’, just beginning to open as part of the buttonhole posy.
I’m not a great fan of the buttonhole sporting a very stiff carnation, backed by a spray of feathery fern, underpinned with a clutch of crunchy-looking dry gypsophila heads. I think you, having grown all your own flowers, might prefer to make a miniature posy for your true-love’s boutonnière (and for his best man, the ushers, your dad, his dad . . . corsages for your mum, his mum, granny . . . and I know I’m making assumptions: it might very well be he making the buttonholes, not she).
The principle of making a buttonhole or corsage is the same. Traditionally, men wear buttonhole posies in their buttonholes, but modern fashions usually have them pinned to the lapel. Similar arrangements for women are pinned to outfits or to handbags, or attached to combs and worn in the hair, or to ribbons and tied round the wrist.
What you’ll need
An odd number of flowers and leaves – three, five or seven – it’s up to you. More than seven and you’ll be making quite a big posy to be pinned to a lapel.
If you choose to use wire, you’ll need very fine stub wire: you can buy this in large quantities (far more than you’re likely to need) from a florists’ sundries supplier online, or your local florist should be able to sell you a small quantity. Very fine wire can be cut with scissors, so you won’t need wire clippers.
Carbon-bladed florist’s scissors.
Raffia or string to tie.
Ribbon if you’d like, for a final flourish.
Pearl-headed pins – as many as you have buttonholes, or, for heavy buttonholes, perhaps two pins for each.
Stemtex – stretchy self-adhesive tape, which you can use to bind buttonhole stems to make them tidy. Personally, I usually prefer to see the stems. It depends on the wedding and your preference: you are your own florist.
Choosing your ingredients
You’ll need to remember to put aside the ingredients for buttonholes while you do the rest of your floristry. Ideal buttonhole material can always be found in side shoots, broken heads, little extras which might otherwise be composted. Keep some jars full of clean water to hand so that you can pop these little stems in them as you work, and you’ll have plenty of material at the end to make a lovely mix of miniature posies that will work as buttonholes.
If you do want to have a feature flower, so that your buttonholes and corsages all have a certain look, then you’ll need to reserve those flowers for the purpose. I like to keep rosebuds for this, rather than fully open roses. It’s amazing how the buds open through the day (encouraged by the warmth of the person they’re pinned to), and they’re less likely to wilt than open roses. Though with good conditioning and careful tying, right up under the neck of the flowers when you make the buttonholes, you shouldn’t suffer any wilting flowers at all.
Can I use sweet peas?
Sweet peas do work in buttonholes, but they need support. Use stems with flowers that aren’t quite out yet (they’ll come out during the day). If there are too many flowers on the stem, pull off those below the top inch or two of the stem.
Flowers that make good buttonhole material
The kinds of flowers that will work well in buttonholes change throughout the year, but the factors that make them good can always be found in the cut-flower patch.
Use flowers with thin, but strong, stems: tulips, roses, pompon dahlias, autumn chrysanthemums.
By all means use flowers with weaker stems, but support them with stronger stems so that their heads don’t flop.
Seedheads make good support material: poppies and scabious are great.
A tall, twiggy leaf makes a good background: rosemary is excellent all year round.
Use flowers that aren’t fully open: they’ll open through the day against the warmth of the person wearing them.
How to make your buttonhole
Choose perhaps five or seven short stems. You could use, say, a rosebud, a sweet pea, a sprig of rosemary, a little scabious head, a nigella seedhead, a leaf of cineraria and a poppy seedhead. Seedheads are great because they’re not going to wilt, and are generally on good, strong stems.
Take your main flower – perhaps the biggest and strongest-stemmed flower of your mix: the rosebud, say – and hold it between thumb and forefinger. Add the other stems you’re using around it, crossing each stem over the last from right to left and then making a quarter turn of the posy before adding the next stem. This may feel over-fussy when you’re making a posy this small, but this method keeps the flower heads tight with each other, and the stems very tidy and as tight with one another as they can be.
Ingredients conditioning before being turned into bouquet and buttonholes.
For a simple buttonhole posy, you might (you might prefer not to) wire your main flower. This will make the central flower very strong, helping to support the other flowers in the mix.
Your main flower should be roughly in the middle of the mix. Use the seedheads and strong stems at what will be the front of the buttonhole, to help support the arrangement, and anything softer or less sturdy at the back. The sweet pea, for example, can be draped over the stronger rosebud to keep the flowers upright.
Arrange the tall leaf you’ve chosen, and any other uprights, like the sprig of rosemary or a poppy seedhead, at the back: they’ll lie flat against the clothing the buttonhole will be pinned to. (You can see that floristry is like making miniature herbaceous borders.)
So now you should have: a main flower in the middle, surrounded on the front by supporting material and framed behind by a leaf, which will lie flat against the shirt or jacket of the wearer. All will be arranged with a tight spiral of stems, which will hold the teeny buttonhole posy in place.
Take whatever you’re going to use to tie your buttonholes, and fold a length in two. I recommend raffia, as it has a good grip and doesn’t make too chunky a binding. Keeping a length of perhaps 15cm (6”) down the stem of your posy (so that you have an end to tie with), start binding from tight up under the flower heads of your posy. This is important because the binding is also going to help support the arrangement you’ve made. Bind down the stems for perhaps 4cm (1½”). Then take the end you held down the stem and use it to tie a double knot. You can cut the spare raffia close to the knot, or make a bow, or cover the whole stem length with Stemtex, or re-bind with a twist of ribbon over the top of the raffia.
I recommend you use something like a takeaway delivery carton to store your buttonholes when they’re made. Make a grid across the top using tape, with the right number of sections for the number of buttonholes you have. Fill the carton with water, then pop a buttonhole into each section, where it can have a nice drink overnight. Pop a pin into the back of the buttonhole at this stage as well, so that you won’t have to remember pins the next day, when things might be getting a bit hectic.
When you’ve made your buttonhole posy, put it in water overnight to drink up as much as it possibly can. It’ll last much better this way than if kept cool in a fridge on a tray, which some people advocate.
When you take buttonholes out of water, give them a good squeeze with a towel (real towels absorb water better than paper and leave no soggy bits behind). Buttonholes should last nicely through the day. You might, if you have time, if your fingers aren’t too tired, and you think of it, make a second buttonhole for the groom, in case some of his friends have hugged him overenthusiastically before the photographs are taken.
Wiring
Of course you can wire flowers, if you want to. But for these little posies, I don’t think you really need to. Your time is probably short and you won’t be practised – so you might prefer to keep things simple. If you’re not using wire, the trick is to keep the flower heads tight in with on
e another so that they support each other’s heads, and to use stronger-stemmed material on the outside to support any potentially floppier flowers. Wiring will help give extra strength – but practise your buttonholes, and you may become confident without it. If you do want to use wire, here’s how. If you’d like to improve your wiring skills, though, you might wish to attend a course or workshop to learn more.
Take your flower and push the fine stub wire up through the head of it.
Push the very fine stub wire up through the head of your flower.
To wire a flower, use very fine stub wire.
Turn the wire back and pull it back through the flower head, taking care not to bruise petals, and making sure that the loop of the wire, when pulled back, doesn’t show on the flower head. This is where you must be very delicate or you risk pulling the flower head off – the wire is strong, and a flower can suffer from being mauled by it.
1. Push the wire up through the centre of the flower head then bend it over and push it back again through the flower head.
Now you could cut the stem of the flower off close to the flower head and use the wire to make a very fine false stem, which you can then bind with Stemtex.
Alternatively, you can keep the flower stem, and just twist the wire around a short length of it (5cm/2” is plenty), as pictured below. If you keep the wire long enough, you can use it to bind the posy together when you’ve made it – this is how I prefer to do it.
Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 13