Grow your own Wedding Flowers Read online

  Foreword by Sarah Raven

  Introduction

  PART ONE: PRACTICAL MATTERS

  Chapter 1 Planning ahead

  Chapter 2 Growing your flowers

  Chapter 3 Cutting and conditioning

  PART TWO: PLANNING FOR YOUR WEDDING

  Chapter 4 A spring wedding

  Chapter 5 An early-summer wedding

  Chapter 6 A high-summer wedding

  Chapter 7 An autumn wedding

  Chapter 8 A winter wedding

  PART THREE: WEDDING FLORISTRY

  How to make a hand-tied posy or bouquet

  How to make a buttonhole or corsage

  How to make a table centrepiece

  How to make a garland

  How to make a flower crown

  How to make fresh petal confetti

  Afterword

  Appendix 1: Plant names

  Appendix 2: Season planner

  Resources

  Index

  To my parents, Gilly and Nigel Newbery

  Gilly, the gardener and florist, who taught me that if you just get on and do something then you’ll get much further than if you first sit about wondering if it’s possible or not.

  Nigel, the thinker, who is still trying to teach me that if I think while I do, then I can be strategically ready for barriers I will inevitably hit if I’ve not prepared for them in advance.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a book while running a business is a triumph of the desire to write over common sense and time constraints. Because I take centre stage where the press, and therefore credits, for Common Farm Flowers is concerned, publicity-wary Fabrizio is sometimes sidelined. And yet, without his support and encouragement, it would not be possible for me to snatch my writing time from family breakfasts and happy Sundays. (I write this while he has taken the kids off to see Sweet Track, the Neolithic road across the Somerset Levels, and I have the house to myself: fire lit, Bach playing, kitchen table mine alone.) His is the commonsense practicality grounding my flights of floral fancy. Without his digging, compost moving, mulching, rabbit-proofing, fencing, gating, mowing and doing most of the cooking, Common Farm Flowers and my flower-related books would not exist.

  The rest of the Common Farm Flowers team too deserve all my thanks: Sharon, Emily, Ann, Phil, Nic and Karen.

  And thanks to Alethea and Jayne, the editor and designer of this book, who turn my cursive chat into something that is both a reference resource and the inspiration to others that I intend it to be.

  As a gardener who has grown cut flowers for 20 years, I can totally see why many of us love the idea of growing all the flowers for our own weddings. It’s hugely satisfying – from seed to bunch or flower crown – and you’ll have a cut-flower patch humming with bees in the meantime. Then there’s the scent of real garden flowers and the twist and turn of a stem, which you rarely get in flowers commercially grown; not to mention the small fortune you can save by growing and arranging your own.

  It’s possible to do and I hugely recommend it, but it’s worth having some advice and expertise to set you on the right track. It’s good to know how many flowers you’ll need and how to get them ready on the right day: how to cut, condition and arrange them. That’s exactly what this good and useful book will tell you. Georgie has kept it simple – the gardening information given in an easy-to-digest, matter-of-fact way; the cutting and conditioning advice really useful for someone who might be an experienced gardener but might not have spent much time cutting their plants for posies or bouquets. How much space do you need to grow a wedding? How many stems do you need for wedding flowers? How long do they need to condition before being used in floristry? That’s all here.

  Georgie describes herself as a gardener rather than a horticulturalist, and her floristry is all self-taught. If she can grow flowers for over 50 weddings a year, then her advice and experience is just what will help you to grow your own successfully for your wedding day.

  Sarah Raven

  www.sarahraven.com

  Imagine a wedding, and what do you see? A bride and groom; happy, smiling faces . . . and flowers. I’ll bet the third thing you think of when you picture a wedding is the flowers. Flowers frame a wedding, enclosing the happy couple in a bower of loveliness. I’ve never heard of a wedding that didn’t have at least a bouquet for the bride and a buttonhole for the groom. Flowers are in almost every photograph of a wedding – dressing the people, the ceremony, the aisle, the tables, even the lavatories! What would a wedding be without flowers?

  Yet wedding flowers can be enormously expensive. And rightly so. Ask a florist to arrange even just a bride’s bouquet, three bridesmaids’ posies, five buttonholes, and (for a small wedding) perhaps three table centrepieces, and that florist will probably be up at 6am creating the most immaculate and exquisite arrangements. Good florists know how important the flowers are to a bride and groom, and go to great lengths to make sure that wedding flowers are the most beautiful confections they make. The roses must be just right – open, but not going over; the trailing honeysuckle exquisite; the bride’s bouquet so lovely the florist can hardly bear to give it away. So, yes, even for a small wedding scheme, flowers created by a professional florist should be expensive.

  But wedding flowers aren’t just financially pricey. Couples are becoming more concerned about the environmental cost of their nuptials. They don’t want their happy celebrations to be filled with flowers doused in chemicals and flown in from far, far away. They want their wedding day to be beautiful, but not at an unsustainable cost to the environment.

  So more and more couples are looking for locally grown flowers. And those with gardens, time, inclination, helpful relatives . . . might be looking to grow those flowers themselves. After all, back in the day, the grannies did all the wedding flowers, with blooms grown by the grandads. For my wedding my mother wandered my late-autumn garden and put together a bouquet of one nerine lily, old man’s beard, blackberries, purple dogwood leaves, acorns and oak leaves. It cost nothing but a little of her kind time, and a stretch of ribbon to tie it all.

  A bride’s hand-tied bouquet with garden roses for an early-summer wedding.

  Jam-jar posies can be stunning in a wedding scheme.

  This book is designed to be a practical guide to growing and arranging wedding flowers for yourself, whatever season you plan to hold your wedding in. It will show you how to plan, grow, cut, condition and arrange the flowers for your wedding – from table centrepieces to a beautiful hand-tied bride’s bouquet.

  Whether your aim is just to keep your flower budget under control, or your dream is to grow your whole wedding scheme, this is the book for the home-growing bride and groom: the couple who don’t want their wedding to cost the earth.

  How to use this book

  First there’s the gardening, but there’s also the planning for cutting, conditioning and arranging your flowers. How many stems will you need? How much space to grow them? Where should you put your flowers when you’ve cut them? I’ve aimed to cover all this in these pages. The point of this book is that you should feel confident, when it comes to the days before your wedding, that the flowers you’ve grown can be cut, conditioned and turned into arrangements, in plenty of time, without any last-minute adrenaline rushes.

  I’ve tried to ensure that the book is presented in a way that makes it easy for you to use. Yes, there are plenty of photographs, which should provide inspiration for what you might do with the flowers you grow, as well as what you might grow.

  I also appreciate that weddings take place throughout the year, and so I’ve split the wedding planning section into seasons, so you don’t have to read a lot about late-summer plantin
g if you’ve booked to be married in spring.

  I’ve also included a section with how-tos for those who are planning their floristry. If, having read these sections, you feel you’d like more detailed practical help, then I do recommend a day’s course with a florist teaching wedding floristry for people planning on doing their own.

  A note on quantities

  For some of you, the idea of a hundred guests may seem onerous; for others, too few, but in this book I cater (floristically) for a wedding designed around a hundred guests sitting at ten tables, with both sets of parents, three bridesmaids, a best man and one usher (groomsman). Bear that in mind when making your own calculations, and you can scale up or down depending on the numbers you plan to involve at your own celebrations.

  A note on seasons

  I hope that couples in countries around the world will read this book and be inspired to grow their own flowers, and so, rather than referring to the months of the year by name, I’ve used generic translations (‘early spring’, ‘mid spring’, etc.). I expect that people planning to grow their own wedding flowers will already have a good idea of the timing of the seasons in their own garden, and so I leave readers to gauge for themselves when their ‘early spring’ or ‘high summer’ may be, wherever they live. If your climate is colder than average, you will have a shorter flowering season, with a later spring and an earlier autumn than in warmer climes, so bear this in mind when you plan your flower growing. (For example, in the far north of the UK, ‘early spring’ may not come until April, whereas in the warmer south-west it will be March.)

  By the way, I use ‘midsummer’ to refer to the month of the summer solstice; ‘midwinter’ to the month of the winter solstice (June and December respectively, in the northern hemisphere). To refer to the middle of the summer growing season (July in the northern hemisphere), I use the terms ‘middle of summer’ or ‘high summer’, while ‘mid winter’ refers to the middle of the winter season (January in the northern hemisphere).

  To put the advice in this book in context: in the south-west of the UK, where we grow our flowers, the climate is broadly equivalent in temperature and season to zone 9 in the US system of plant hardiness zones.

  The higher the sun in the sky and the longer the days, the wider the range of flowers and foliage one can grow to cut. However romantic and candlelit a winter wedding may be, the options for home-grown flowers and foliage at that time of year are fewer. However, I still say that a winter wedding can be just as magical as a summer one – with candles, and greenery, and perhaps the bride in a hooded velvet cloak . . . Whatever the season, the sowing and growing lists in this book are there to inspire you: snapshots, if you like, of the myriad varieties available to grow. Take my ideas as a starting point, and continue your research by trawling the lovely seed catalogues available online.

  Horticultural Latin

  Throughout this book I’ve tried to refer to plants in a way that will be most useful to you, the reader. If the plant is generally known by its Latin name (or an anglicized version of its Latin name), then that’s what I’ve used, but in most cases I’ve used the common name by which a plant is generally known in the UK. Please see Appendix 1 for the Latin and common names for all the plants described in this book. I’m conscious that plants may be known as something quite different in, for example, the USA. This is why horticultural Latin is such a useful tool for gardeners!

  Who will be growing the flowers?

  Forgive me if in these pages I speak often of the bride as the decision-maker, thereby apparently excluding others. Of course, a wedding is a day for a couple to plan, with their friends and families involved, and a wedding day is not exclusively the bride’s to dictate. However, if I constantly said “The couple, and their parents, and . . .”, etc. at the beginning of any sentence suggesting one action or another, this book would be unreadable. Indeed, it is often the mother or mother-in-law-to-be of the bride who grows the wedding flowers, while the father or father-in-law-to-be provides a little muscle in the flowerbed-prepping area. Sometimes it is the groom who is more interested than the bride in the flowers. I do try to ring the changes a little when I talk about who is in charge of decisions, so as not to sound as though it is always the bride who decides everything from day one of an engagement.

  Who are we?

  The ‘we’ I talk about throughout this book are me, Fabrizio – my husband and business partner – and the team at Common Farm Flowers in Somerset, southwest England. We began a business growing cut flowers to be used in our own floristry 5 years ago almost to the day (as I write this on 31st March 2015, the business is 5 years old tomorrow). We now cater to around 50 weddings a year, as well as sending flowers by post throughout the UK mainland all year round, and teaching a great many workshops – including how to grow your own wedding flowers, and how to arrange your own wedding flowers. Since we started Common Farm Flowers, the ‘slow flowers’ movement has really taken off, with growers around the world beginning to offer a locally grown alternative to the hundreds of millions of very samey flowers supplied by multinationals, who grow in vast tracts of land around Lake Naivasha in Kenya, on mountainsides in Venez uela and Colombia, in parts of northern India, etc. Slow flower growers often have the health of the environ ment at the heart of their business ethos, seeing what they do as an opportunity to feed the bees as well as to grow beautiful, scented, fresh flowers to sell to their locale for a living. We are proud to count ourselves as just such a business.

  The author installing an arch of flowers for a country wedding in Somerset.

  Why grow your own wedding flowers?

  There are several reasons why you might wish to take this route. The obvious ones are: a) cost; b) a love of gardening; c) an exciting challenge.

  Cost

  At the time of writing, couples in the UK can expect to spend, on average, somewhere in the region of £1,500 to £2,000 on flowers for their wedding. The flower budget alone can hit the £20-£30,000 mark if the scheme is to be seriously luxurious, involve a lot of fiddly floristry and require a large team to transport and install the flowers (as well as take them away) at a weekend.

  You may understandably wish to save some of this cost: after all, a few packets of seed will cost you very little. That said, the time required to grow your own flowers is a different kind of commitment, which it’s worth considering before you decide on the grow-your-own approach.

  You love gardening

  If you, or members of your family, love gardening, and already have a good, established garden you can cut from, this is the ideal situation. When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were married in Westminster Abbey in 2011, a great many of the flowers that festooned that enormous old church were cut from royal gardens. You might not have that kind of acreage to cut from – but then you are probably looking at a more manageable guest list of around 100 rather than several thousand, and therefore a smaller venue to dress with flowers. A well-established garden of mixed perennials and shrubs, with a few annuals put in especially, should be able to supply plenty of material for a home-grown wedding.

  A jug of foxglove ‘Sutton’s Apricot’, an easy-to-grow biennial found proliferating in many gardens, makes a great addition where there’s room for a tall arrangement.

  You love a challenge

  Maybe you just want to have a go at it, on a piece of land you’ve spied! You can grow plenty of cut flowers for a wedding in a space perhaps half the size of your average allotment. So, even if you have no garden to cut from at the outset, don’t be put off: with the necessary space, a strong back, careful planning, growing your own should be perfectly possible.

  A cornucopia of garden flowers cut fresh from beds you planted yourself is a great reward for all your hard work in the garden.

  A mix of flowers in jugs and jars makes for a very pretty wedding. This is a late-spring combination with roses, sweet Williams, ox-eye daisies, buttercups, fox-and-cubs, orlaya, ammi majus, nigella and clary sage. About half of these
were grown from seed, but the rest were cut opportunistically from established beds and our wildflower meadow.

  How much to grow

  In this book I will tell you how to grow enough flowers for the following:

  a bride’s bouquet

  three bridesmaids’ posies

  five buttonholes

  one large arrangement for the church

  ten table-centre posies

  three large, jug-sized arrangements for the reception.

  If you bear this in mind when you think about how many arrangements you’d like, you can scale the quantities given here up or down, according to your requirements.

  A bride’s bouquet doesn’t have to be whites or pastels. Here a riot of late-spring colour, bursting with foraged wildflowers as well as those cut from the garden, makes a gorgeous bride’s posy.

  Stem-counting

  This is the boring part, but if from day one you know roughly how many stems you’ll need, then you can work backwards to plan your planting. The following ball-park numbers give an idea of what you’ll need per arrangement.

  Jam-jar posies: 20 stems – so for 10 table-centre posies you’ll need 200 stems.

  Large jugs of flowers: 50 stems – so for 3 jugs you’ll need 150.

  Pedestal arrangement: at least 75 stems.

  Bride’s bouquet: takes more than you might think – about 50 stems.

  Bridesmaids’ posies: each will take about 35 stems, so for 3 you’ll need 105 stems.