Grow your own Wedding Flowers Page 4
Plant out or thin your seedlings to 22cm (9”) apart. This way their roots won’t fight for nutrients or moisture, and you won’t find your flowers suffering from mildew because their roots are dry.
Feed your plants with a nitrogen-rich feed until the midsummer, and a potassium-rich feed thereafter. You can make your own plant-feeding teas, or use a very weak seaweed solution for a good all-round fortnightly feed.
Water well, but not too often. Water in plants really well when planting them out, and perhaps once a week after that, but not more often. Plants that are watered too often have very shallow roots, which not only means they will suffer in a dry period, but also that they will struggle to stay upright in a strong wind.
It’s probably the cutting and conditioning of flowers that people worry about more than growing – and rightly so! Approach cutting with a devil-may-care attitude, and you risk disaster. Cut your flowers carefully and condition them properly, and you’ll have the best-quality, beautifully scented, gorgeous flowers for your wedding.
For best results
In fact, cutting and conditioning flowers is no dark art: it’s really a matter of good practice. Follow the guidelines below, and all will be well.
When to cut Early in the morning, or in the evening. If you can feel the heat of the sun on the back of your neck, then don’t expect flowers to survive being cut.
How to cut With clean, sharp scissors. Use carbon-bladed florist’s scissors rather than secateurs (unless you are cutting thick, woody stems). You’ll quickly give yourself repetitive strain injury if cutting over 600 stems with secateurs. Cut at a sharp angle: this gives the cut part of the stem maximum surface area for accessing water, through the exposed sponge-action cellulose cells.
As you cut each stem, strip the foliage so that the stems go into the buckets clean.
For a wedding, cut flowers when they are half to three-quarters open. If it’s warm weather, a fully open rose cut on a Thursday will have gone over by Saturday. Cut them part open, and the stress of being cut, then getting an unexpected drink, and being moved to a warm place (which your reception venue is likely to be) will bring them out to perfection for your reception.
Styling tip
Setting out the reception tables
Make sure the tablecloths are unfolded and laid so that the ironing creases point the same way throughout the room. This gives a pleasing tidiness on which your delightful table decorations will be the centre of interest. Equally, if you have runners going across or down the length of tables, it’s more effective if they all go the same way.
For a simple but effective way to add detail to your ‘tablescapes’, add a sprig of lavender or rosemary to the place name cards.
Write names on simple brown card labels and add a sprig of lavender or rosemary for scent and a nice detail. This does take a bit of time, so remember to include the time needed in your spreadsheet.
Searing woody plants Cut thick, woody stems of flowers or foliage at a sharp angle with secateurs. Cut up the stem cleanly 5cm (2”), so that you split the stem a little, and then sear it by putting the fresh-cut stem straight into 5cm of boiling water. Cut all the woody stems you need from any one plant into boiling water in this way, then top up the bucket with cold water and leave the stems to condition as you would any other cut material. Searing stops plants that have a tendency to wilt from doing so. I find this is particularly needed in the early part of the year, when growth is more sappy.
In addition to woody stems, some other material can be improved by searing, if it has started to flop: wilting roses can be revived, and poppies can be encouraged to stand in water.
If cutting shrubs and woody perennials later on in the season (hydrangeas, for example), when there will be new growth, cut into the new growth (the green stem) and avoid cutting last year’s growth (woody, with bark) – then the drinking cells in the stem will be younger and fresher, and better at drinking up water.
Sweet pea tip
If your sweet peas are on stems too short for your floristry purposes, then cut longer sections of the plant, including leaves and curling tendrils: these will give your bigger arrangements interesting texture and shapes as well as the scent of the glorious sweet pea. I often use this technique, especially towards the end of the season, for late-autumn weddings, when sweet-pea stems can be down to 15cm (6”) or less.
Foliage In winter, cut foliage in the mildest part of the day. Foliage cut when frozen solid or covered in snow might defrost to mush if you bring it into warm too quickly. Cut it into buckets of clean water (no need for searing in winter), then let it acclimatize somewhere out of the frost but not in the heat of the house (a log shed, a garage, the back porch), before bringing it into the house for arranging.
In the spring, summer and early autumn, sear foliage stems as described here, and give them a nice long drink before arranging them. I try to cut summer foliage to the length I intend to use it, so that the stems don’t need cutting, and therefore searing, again. You’ll find that the greener the stem you’re cutting, the less searing the foliage needs: new-season growth has sappier stems, which drink water more easily than the previous season’s woodier stems.
Count your stems as you cut them, so that you know exactly how many you’ve got. You will have a plan in which your required stem-count is carefully laid out, and you can tick off numbers as you cut. You’ll have a lot to do in those last few days before the wedding, so you don’t want to waste time cutting more flowers than you need – or, worse, not enough. (See ‘How to make a hand-tied posy or bouquet’, for tips on practice posies and bouquets.)
Containers
Cut into tall buckets, scrupulously clean, filled with fresh, clean water. Make sure you have suitable buckets for the job. For example, don’t assume that old yard buckets will be good to cut flowers into – they are wider at the neck than at their base, and shorter in height than they are wide, so heavy-headed flowers tend to fall out of them. A bucket that is more or less the same circumference at neck and base, and a good deal taller than it is wide, is more use for conditioning cut flowers in.
Abandon all romantic images you may have of yourself floating about the garden in the sunshine, cutting flowers into a trug. Flowers need to be cut direct into water if they are to perform well for you.
It might be worth investing in a trolley for pulling your buckets about your cut-flower patch and cutting into. Of course, this depends how much you want to spend on what might become something of a growing-cut-flower habit that lasts long after the glories of the wedding day itself.
Here we’ve used a variety of buckets depending on the stem length of the material we’ve cut. Sweet peas tend to be shorter-stemmed but abundant, so we use large, deep, rectangular containers and make taped grids across the top, so we can cut the flowers 20 at a time into each section. The container at the front contains 100 sweet peas.
A trolley might be a useful investment: it makes a welcome alternative to a barrow, when you need to transport things on a flat surface to avoid spillage.
Cut bulbs into separate containers. Bulbs weep syrupy sap when they’re cut, and this will make the water they’re in discolour and fill with bacteria quickly. Let them condition in their own water and then arrange them with other material the next day.
Don’t overcrowd your buckets, especially if you’re cutting flowers when they’re wet or it’s raining: the delicate petals of fresh-cut-flowers shoved tightly into a small space will bruise and squash. You’ve spent a great deal of time and energy growing these flowers, so give them space to condition nicely and they’ll be absolutely at their best for your wedding.
Abandon all romantic images you may have of yourself floating about the garden, cutting flowers into a trug. Flowers need to be cut direct into water if they’re to perform well.
A note on skin reactions to plants
There are a few plants that can cause a nasty skin reaction. Whether it be the fine hairs on the flower stems that irritate,
or the sap, which might be caustic, do be wary – especially if it’s you cutting the flowers for your wedding: you don’t want unsightly marks down your arms when you’ve spent a fortune on that gorgeous sleeveless dress!
Contact dermatitis caused by plants often simply shows up as little red marks on your skin, though these can also blister. So be cautious, and wear long sleeves and gloves when cutting or arranging suspect plants. The reaction is often stronger if handling plant material in sunlight. The following are plants that we have found to cause skin reactions:
achillea
alchemilla
euphorbia
hogweed.
Conditioning
Put your buckets of flowers somewhere cool, airy and out of direct sunlight for the flowers to condition. A garage, cellar or cool barn would be ideal. Leave your flowers for at least 12 hours or overnight, to have a good long drink (this is when they are being ‘conditioned’) before you start to arrange them.
Cutting and conditioning checklist
You will need:
Carbon-bladed florist’s scissors.
Sharp secateurs for cutting woody stems.
Clean buckets, taller than they are wide – one per 20 stems you plan to cut.
A cool, airy place, out of direct sunlight, to put the flowers to condition overnight.
Flower food
Should you use flower food? I say not. You are not asking your flowers to last for a month on a sideboard gathering dust, as a sad, much-pulsed-with-sugar-and-bleach imported bunch of gerberas might. You are looking for life, growth, a field of flowers in every posy dancing a celebration of your wedding day. Flowers cut from your garden, following the instructions I’ve given above, will last happily from Wednesday or Thursday through to Saturday afternoon with nothing but fresh water and clean containers to keep them looking their best. However, if you wish, you can make a good home-made flower food in the following way.
Home-made flower food recipe
To 1 litre (1¾ pints) of water add half a teaspoon of sugar, a drop of bleach, and a tiny squeeze of lemon juice (sugar = food; bleach = bacteria killing; lemon juice = pH balancing). Water treated like this will never look crystal clear, and I think that the best way to frame a home-grown bunch of abundant floral beauty is with clean glass and clear water, but you must make your own choice. Perhaps when you make your practice posies you might experiment to see what difference home-made flower food makes to the life of a bunch of your flowers.
Making a plan
This is where I suggest you get really punctilious. You may be rolling your eyes at me, but strict planning is the enemy of last-minute panics, and nobody needs any extra exhausting crises on top of Aunt Betty needing collecting from the airport, Uncle Fred endlessly hovering and asking for jobs to do, and that not-terribly-helpful neighbour dropping in again to chat and drink coffee when you have a wedding to prepare.
The spreadsheet
When I teach growing your own wedding flowers, people look at me in horror when I first bring up the subject of the spreadsheet. They’re looking forward to gardening; to admiring the fruits of their labours; to standing back and watching the flowers dance in the breeze – not slaving over Excel on the computer screen. Well, don’t panic! There’s plenty of time for standing back and admiring too. The spreadsheet can be done well in advance. What it will do for you is inform the schedule of the last few days before the wedding. Although this isn’t complicated, it is well worth planning in advance. So draft your spreadsheet, then you can see how many stems you’ll need to cut. From this, you can decide how many people you may need to help you cut, store, condition, and then make the flower arrangements. Just to give you an idea, it takes Sharon, Emily and me 2 hours to cut about 1,000 stems, but we’re very fast and efficient. If you’re doing a wedding of, say, 650 stems, you’ll probably need four or five of you to help.
Plan ahead and you’ll be able to give your team of helpers strict instructions, so that on the floristry day all goes smoothly and there are no last-minute crises.
So your spreadsheet might look like the one below. The numbers it gives are by no means set in stone, but you can see how, if you practise making your posies, etc., you can note how many stems of each variety you need, and translate that into numbers for other stages of the process.
Here is an example spreadsheet for an early-summer wedding. A spreadsheet like this can be used to organize all the floristry for your wedding – the timing, the quantities, who’s responsible for each activity, etc. You can add more detail: how much ribbon, number of jars, number of tea lights, etc. In this case, as it’s not a huge wedding, I haven’t split the cutting list into two evenings. But, depending on how much help you have, you might choose to cut the physocarpus, ammi and nigella, for example, on Wednesday evening, and the rest on Thursday evening.
The helpers and the boss
This year I helped two lovely ladies prepare to do the flowers for the wedding of a son. They had ambitious plans, including balls of flowers hanging from the bars criss-crossing the ceiling of the reception venue, garlanding, big flower-foam-based arrangements, and three posies per table for twenty tables at the reception. I suggested they might need more than just the two of them to get all this work done in a day. But they knew each other well and felt that a bigger team might slow them down, and that they’d rather just get on with the job. I still think they could have done with two or three extra helpers. Ask more people to help than you think you’ll need. Arranging wedding flowers is a time-consuming and fiddly business, especially if the people doing it aren’t used to arranging flowers very often.
The skill is for one person to take charge, of the planning and the team. A big badge reading ‘The Boss’ is a cheery joke, but it also reminds everyone of who is directing operations. You, the person in charge, are the one who will have practised making all the arrangements you want to do, and this will inform your planning. It’s always very important to practise your floristry in advance when doing your own.
Practise making your posies in advance, and not only will you know how many stems per posy you need, but also you’ll be able to show your helpers what you’d like them to do.
Careful planning will ensure that your wedding flowers reflect your dream perfectly.
Wedding helpers love the process of helping with weddings to be exciting. Imposing spreadsheet-style organization on the situation will certainly make the experience less thrilling. However, you do not need any more excitement than knowing that the flowers are grown and will be cut, and the floristry will be done in plenty of time before the rehearsal on (say) Friday evening. So impose your will, and your flowers will be cut as you planned and arranged as you’d like, and the day will reflect the dream you have.
The schedule
Work back from the time your wedding ceremony is booked, and think carefully about the time you will have available. If your wedding is to take place on a Saturday afternoon, the chances are that the morning will be taken up with the hairdresser and other last-minute preparations. I recommend that you aim to get as much flower preparation as possible done the day before, so that you’re not handling mess-making, water-sloshing, destined-for-the-compost-bin material when there are costly silk and satin dresses about to be spilled upon. Also, whether it’s the bride in charge of these lovely home-grown flowers, or her mum, or the groom’s mum, it is a fact that every bride needs half an hour on the morning of her wedding for a nervous moment, and in that moment she needs her mum and her girlfriends and sisters to be free to be with her. Nobody needs to be distracted from that crucial time because there are still flowers to be done.
So try to get all flowery business finished before the rehearsal on Friday night – and any flowery work still to be done on the Saturday morning is best delegated to a trusted friend who won’t be needed for other important roles.
For the purposes of this book, let’s assume your wedding is to take place on Saturday afternoon. If it is to be on another
day of the week, simply take the timings I give here, and alter the day names to suit your schedule.
The only jobs you could do on the Saturday morning – and only if you’d like to do them then, rather than on Friday – are making the bride’s bouquet, the bridesmaids’ posies, and perhaps the buttonholes and corsages – but I would really heartily recommend that you try to have these made by Friday night. A wander round the garden deadheading roses into a basket on the Saturday morning will also give you fresh petal confetti. However, all of these jobs can be done on the Friday, and I would say that, if you can, you’d do better to get all the floristry done on the Friday. I will admit I hate rushing, and will do anything to avoid a last-minute fluster of any kind. If you like the adrenaline rush of doing things at the last minute, then by all means plan to make your bouquet on the Saturday morning!
Buttonholes made the day before will be perfectly happy if left somewhere cool and airy with their stems in water overnight before the wedding.
If you’re to do all the floristry on the Friday, you’ll need to have all your flowers cut by Thursday evening, so that they can spend the night having a nice drink before being arranged.
Cutting and conditioning countdown
Wednesday evening
Cut foliage and filler. Leave to condition in clean buckets of fresh water.