Grow your own Wedding Flowers Read online

  Buttonholes – we use a minimum of 5 short stems each, so for 5 buttonholes you’ll need 25 stems.

  And there you have it – a whole wedding in 605 stems!

  Now, 605 stems might sound like a lot, but remember that about a third of those can be foliage (in the winter that proportion may be greater; indeed, you may make the whole wedding scheme out of foliage) – so then you only need grow 405 stems for your wedding flowers. You could plant just 500 of the same tulips, or 500 narcissi, and there you have your wedding – all the single-flowering plants can be planted to flower on time (weather permitting) especially for your day. And 500 tulips or narcissi planted shoulder to shoulder could take as little space as one 3m by 1m (10’ × 3’) bed. Not too much space, nor too costly, when you think that you can buy tulip bulbs for as little as £10 for a net of 50 bulbs. So there you go: your budget is suddenly set to £100 for your whole wedding flower order. Admittedly there is the cost to your back and the space in your garden, and a teeny amount of stress about whether they’ll be in flower on the right day – putting all your eggs in one basket is a little risky – and you have to cut, condition and arrange them. But the main point is that if you take your flower-growing plans and split them into discrete projects like this, then what you have to do to achieve your home-grown wedding becomes really quite manageable.

  A big bucketful of flowers will make a large jug arrangement and the bride’s bouquet (left and centre), plus a few small posies.

  What to plant

  Your choice of flowers will of course depend on the season you have in mind for your wedding. You might even want to schedule your wedding to fit the time of year when your favourite flowers are in bloom. Whether it be spring for tulips, early summer for roses, autumn for sunflowers, late winter for white anemones smiling through a mass of flowering ivy in a tiny, country church . . . We will look at specific seasons in later chapters. Use this chapter to make your initial plan.

  Be sensible about what will be possible at any given time of year. You can’t expect annuals that start flowering in late spring to be in tip-top condition to cut for an autumn wedding, for example.

  In winter, handfuls of foliage and berries, such as this mix of variegated pittosporum and wild spindle berries, could make a solid basis for your whole wedding scheme.

  Knapweed cuts beautifully into wedding flowers. You might find butterflies visiting your reception if you use these in your scheme.

  To get you started, in the table below are some easy lists of cut flowers, foliage and filler, and some wildflowers that you might be able to find. These lists are by no means definitive: they’re just to give you inspiration and help you begin to make your plan.

  IDEAS FOR FLOWER COMBINATIONS

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Winter

  Cultivated flowers

  Narcissi

  Sweet peas

  Sunflowers

  Anemones

  Tulips

  Roses

  Japanese anemones

  Ranunculus

  Peonies

  Cornflowers

  Dahlias

  Hyacinths

  Irises

  Ammi majus

  Ammi visnaga

  Narcissi

  Grape hyacinths

  Delphiniums

  Cosmos

  Amaryllis

  Foliage & filler

  Early emerging leaves

  Bupleurum

  Bells of Ireland

  Flowering ivy

  Cow parsley

  Alchemilla

  Bronze fennel

  Holly

  Fruit-tree blossom

  Mint & other herbs

  Sea holly

  Euphorbias

  Sun spurge

  Garden shrubs

  Mint & other herbs

  Willow & dogwood

  Wildflowers

  Cowslips

  Buttercups

  Wild carrot

  Blackthorn (sloe) berries

  Bluebells

  Ox-eye daisies

  Wild scabious

  Old man’s beard

  Snake’s head fritillaries

  Sorrel

  Knapweed

  Spindle berries

  Don’t forget the neighbours

  You are not the only gardener in your vicinity. Your neighbours’ gardens may have good supplies of ivy, roses and other goodies. I have two lovely clients who each have a daughter being married from home next summer, their ceremonies 6 weeks apart. These two ladies live near one another and both have well-stocked gardens, and they’re planning to grow a good selection of annuals to supplement the perennials and foliage they already have to hand. They are working together; both gardens supplying both weddings – a great plan!

  Obviously you need to ask the neighbours if you can have a nice chunk of that flowering ivy, or some of their lovely roses. I don’t want to be accused of encouraging larceny! But gardeners are usually generous sorts, and neighbours often neighbourly, and the chances are that they won’t mind being asked. They may even, if you ask them far enough in advance, offer to grow something for you. Is there a kind gentleman down the lane who always wins prizes at the village show with his sweet peas? People love to help, especially with a wedding.

  Some gardeners can’t help but grow too many sweet peas and will be happy to let you have some of their surplus for your wedding.

  A word on style

  Please indulge me while I say a few words on style.

  Wedding flowers don’t have to look ‘weddingy’. In fact, one of the great advantages of growing your own and arranging them yourself is that you can ensure that your flowers will be full of life and dance for you. The chances are that you won’t have the skills required to make your flowers into a solid mass of lifeless constraint, which is what I often see when I look at ‘designer’ wedding flowers.

  So take this opportunity to think cleverly about colour: just because you’re growing wedding flowers doesn’t mean you must automatically think pink. If the garden where you’re to hold your reception has a stunning custard-yellow ‘Graham Thomas’ rose growing around the door, then think about yellow. Yellow, white and green make such a fresh combination.

  Think about dark colours too: choose interest over ‘bridal’, and go with the seasons. The people whose gardens you may beg extra material from won’t have planted a scheme with your wedding in mind, but will have created a garden that goes with the seasons as they unfold. Spring gardens are generally made up of pinks and purples, with some blues. Midsummer gets pinker and whiter, with also dark red and yellow roses. And as the season goes on the colours heat up, with jewel-coloured dahlias, sunflowers, fiery heleniums – taking you through until the first frosts. It might be wise to work with the colours easily available to you, because growing your own is great, but it would be churlish to turn down a garden of roses to pick just because they don’t go with your childhood dream of pale pink for your wedding.

  Just because you’re growing wedding flowers doesn’t mean you must automatically think pink.

  ‘Graham Thomas’ is a gorgeous yellow rose, full of scent. Here it’s in a posy with ammi majus and white Jacob’s ladder.

  When to plant

  So the plan is made, you know roughly how many guests and therefore how many table-centre posies you’ll need, you know the venue, you know how many bridesmaids and ushers, you know the date . . . But don’t start planting yet!

  Work backwards from your date and sow or plant accordingly. The following is a guideline, for every season through the year. And when it comes to annuals, always hedge your bets: the key to success is successional sowing. Remember to sow little and often, and all will be well.

  For a mid-spring wedding, with tulips and narcissi and early wildflowers, you’ll need to plant most of what you need through the autumn of the previous year: specifically, narcissi and daffodils in early autumn and tulips in late autumn. Spr
ing wildflowers such as cowslips can be grown on from a sowing the previous summer, to make good-sized plugs which can be planted out in autumn for flowering in the spring.

  For a late-spring wedding you may choose to have a scheme involving biennials sown the previous summer, and possibly the first annuals, sown direct or under cover the previous early autumn. Don’t forget lovely perennial peonies, which may be in flower in your or your neighbour’s garden. If you decide to be married in the spring but are too late to sow biennial or perennial seed to have your own plants ready in time, garden centres and nurseries often have good chunks of seedlings for planting out in the autumn. Wallflowers, for example, can be bought bare-root, often just wrapped in damp newspaper, in quantities of 20 or 50.

  A jug of sweet Williams in late spring, grown from seed sown early the previous summer.

  For an early-summer wedding you’ll probably want to use roses, along with the first annuals. Sow annuals in both autumn and spring, to hedge your bets against the vagaries of the weather.

  For a wedding in the middle of summer, annuals sown that year – either in seed trays under cover in late winter, or direct into warming ground in early spring – should be beginning to flower.

  Late-summer weddings can be tough: early-sown annuals are likely to be going over, and, depending on the summer you’re having, you may find that the seed you’ve sown at the beginning of the season has sprouted, grown, flowered, gone over and is already no good to you. So, as ever with annuals, successional sowing can be the key to success.

  For early-autumn weddings, annuals should be sown no earlier than mid spring, and for a good crop in early autumn I recommend perhaps fortnightly sowings of small amounts of seed right up until early summer. As I write, it is coming on to mid autumn, and in the polytunnel we have zinnias and sunflowers in full flower, which I didn’t sow until midsummer this year.

  Mid-autumn weddings will use the last of the perennial garden: final-fling roses, dahlias (so long as you’ve been deadheading them since they started flowering, as early as the middle of summer) and foliage turning to autumn colours. But annuals sown in early summer will flower until the first frosts, so it’s worth planning to have a few in reserve, especially if you have some cover (a polytunnel perhaps) to grow them on in. Again, as I write, in mid autumn, I have a fresh crop of self-seeded annuals in my small tunnel just beginning to flower – a welcome mix of cornflowers and ammi majus, which are giving my arrangements a lovely light feel to balance the richness of the autumn colours.

  Going into winter, you’ll need a great deal more foliage and perhaps forced bulbs for flowers – paperwhite narcissi, hyacinths, amaryllis – perhaps all grown under cover. Evergreen shrubs will help here, especially variegated varieties.

  Work backwards from your date and plant or sow seed accordingly. When it comes to annuals, the key to success is successional sowing. Remember to sow little and often.

  Choosing and buying seed

  When it comes to deciding exactly what to grow, it pays to spend some time looking at all the options. Sit down and take a few hours to trawl through seed suppliers’ websites or mail-order catalogues.

  Why order seed direct from the supplier? Well, it will be fresher and will have been kept in optimum conditions (cool, dark, dry), whereas seed sold by garden centres is often kept for months at a time in conditions similar to a hot greenhouse, and might not be as fresh as it could be.

  Furthermore, seed suppliers will give you a much wider choice than if buying from a garden centre, where the options will be limited by space and by what the managers think customers are likely to want to grow.

  WHY DO WE HAVE FLOWERS AT WEDDINGS?

  It may be that originally they were to conceal the background smell. The world in the old days was a stinkier place: the air a miasma of undrained sewage and unwashed people. Flowers would have had to work hard to fight that, but at least the bride would have had a posy to dip her nose into for some relief.

  People who have ears of corn in their wedding flowers are nodding to ancient fertility rights, though they may not know it!

  If you decide to be married in the spring but are too late to sow biennial or perennial seed to have your own plants ready in time, garden centres and nurseries often have good chunks of seedlings for planting out in the autumn. Wallflowers, for example, can be bought bare-root, often just wrapped in damp newspaper, in quantities of 20 or 50.

  Making your choice

  You’re better off with, say, five or seven varieties of flowers than with just a few each of many more. Keeping your choices down will give your wedding flowers a ‘look’, not too matching, but you’ll have enough of each variety that your scheme will look designed rather than random.

  An easy-to-grow flower such as cosmos (this variety is ‘Purity’) can be used as a fallback in case of failures.

  Do keep your colour palette in mind. This sounds very obvious, but it’s easy to get excited when buying seeds and end up with an assorted mix of black-striped sweet peas, blue cornflowers, orange pot marigolds, yellow annual chrysanthemums – which is all very well if that’s your choice, but when growing your own you have the opportunity to grow to a colour scheme. So do think about the scheme you would like, and keep to it: for example, blue, yellow and white; or pastels; or hot jewel colours. Perhaps make a ‘mood board’ to put all the pictures of the flowers you like together – whether sticking the pictures of the flowers you like into a scrapbook, or using an online tool such as Pinterest. Then you can check not only whether they’ll flower together at the same time, but also whether they look lovely as an ensemble.

  Choose one or two flowers that will make more of a statement in your arrangements. For spring, you might choose tulips; in early summer, roses; in high summer or early autumn, perhaps sunflowers or dahlias. Florists call these ‘accent’ flowers. You don’t necessarily need loads of them. In a jam-jar posy, just one big dahlia head framed by a handful of cheery annuals can make a finished arrangement. If each of your jam-jar posies has one strong accent flower head, then your arrangements will look very pleasing to the eye, even if they’re spread over quite a large reception area.

  In addition to accent flowers, other shapes can help to make your bouquets and posies dance: spikes, daisy shapes, lace caps and buttons. You should also choose one flower that is easy to grow and can be massed effectively: sweet peas, cosmos or ammi majus, for example – these can be your fallback in case of emergency. Lots of cosmos in a jug is gorgeous to look at, as is a big bunch of sweet peas. If all else fails, you’ll have these blooms to rely on.

  Top tips when starting out

  Be sensible about what will be flowering at the time of year your wedding will be. Sticking pictures of peonies in a scrapbook when you’re planning an autumn wedding won’t make peonies flower for you then.

  Make a mood board of the flowers you’d like to have in your scheme. This way you can make sure you’ve got a nice mix of colour, textures and shapes.

  Aim for about five to seven types of flower, plus other goodies – perennials, foliage and wildflowers – that you can find in season.

  Don’t forget plants that are already established and will be in flower at the right time in other gardens. Does Granny grow that gorgeous rose you love? Ask people to help, and you’ll save yourself time and give yourself more choice.

  Order seed direct from seed companies: it’ll be much fresher and give better germination rates than seed that may have been languishing in a hot garden centre’s shop. And a good wholesaler will be able to give helpful advice on varieties, flowering times, and even mixtures that will look good together.

  Ground preparation

  As with all gardening, the health of the earth in which you grow will determine the success of your crop. So prepare your ground carefully. Before you plant anything, the ground needs to be clear of weeds, fed, and raked to a fine tilth. Take the time to pull out roots of perennial weeds. If your ground is dry and well drained, add moisture
-retaining compost. If it’s clay and tends to hold too much water in wet weather, dig in grit to help with drainage. Compost will also help to break up clay soil.

  To get the best possible performance from your flowers, you should feed not only the plants but also the soil. So before planting, add garden compost and/or well-rotted manure. Here at Common Farm Flowers, we feed our soil with a mix of horse manure and compost tea. Recipes for making plant-and soil-feeding teas can be found later in this chapter. (For a more in-depth look at growing cut flowers, I refer you to my previous book, The Flower Farmer’s Year, but this book is intended to supply you with lovely blooms for your wedding, not to put you off with too much detail before you’ve even begun!)

  Your flower patch will be a beautiful thing to enjoy in itself, as well as supplying flowers for your wedding.

  This bed, weeded and raked to a fine tilth, is 1m (3’) wide and 3.5m (12’) long. Three times as much as this should be plenty of space in which to grow your wedding flowers.

  A warning note about horse manure

  Horses are often fed on hay from fields which have been treated with weedkiller, to suppress docks in particular. This goes straight through the horses, comes out in their manure and takes years to break down. If you put this kind of manure, even very well rotted, on your garden as a feed you risk seeing your plants come up twisted, stunted, yellowy and generally unhappy. So for your precious garden, use only manure from horses grass-fed in fields that you know have not been sprayed with weedkiller. This is easy enough to do in the summer months, when horses are put out to graze.