As soon as I got engaged, I knew I wanted to do my own wedding flowers. While I have seen so many inspiring wedding florists' work, I felt that the personal touch was so important. I hope this post can inspire anyone who wants to grow and arrange their own wedding flowers but maybe doesn't quite know where to start.
Planning
I started off by looking for inspiration from gardening magazines, rather than from wedding ones - this was because I knew I would be using plants in containers as well as cut flowers and I wanted to give the impression of an English garden. I found an amazing image in Gardeners World magazine of a garden of only white flowers - Hydrangea limelight, white dahlias, white agapanthus - and this served as inspiration for the whole ceremony set up. 10 months before the wedding, I ordered all the plants from a wholesale company and planted them up in pots to overwinter.
The only exception to this was the dahlias, which I planted in the spring, as they do not do well in frosts.
As the wedding was on our family farm, we wanted a rustic look for the containers, so we used old cattle troughs (with lots of rust holes in the bottom - handy for drainage!) and wine barrels as our containers. We bought a job-lot of wine barrels locally and then cut most of them in half (we left some whole for use as parasol-stands.
Planting
Once the weather warmed up, I planted up the barrels and troughs. I wanted them to have a natural feel, so I used a slightly different combination of plants in each one, but here is the list of plants I chose:
- White dahlias (Onesta, Snowflake, Honka, Diana's Memory (which is actually slightly pink.)
- Hydrangea limelight
- Astrantia major
- Campanula medium white
- Geranium sanguineum "Album"
- Cerastium tomentosum ("Snow in summer")
- Agapanthus album
Due to the very hot weather, it was hard work to keep these watered - we used an irrigation system that was designed to water first thing in the morning which helps to use less water and reduce the stress for the plants.
Setting up
Due to the hot and dry conditions, many of the dahlias had only just started flowering at the time of the wedding, but luckily the hydrangeas stole the show - they were still creamy white with masses of flowers and looked great.
2 days before the wedding, we installed the tubs and troughs around the ceremony area and outside the tent. Luckily I had lots of help and a JCB on hand!
The ceremony was framed by an arch made by my very talented brother and then we added a floral garland, created the night before along with the rest of the wedding arrangements (more on that to come in a future blog post).
If you would like to know more about how I can help you with your own wedding flowers, click here.