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How to grow your own wedding flowers
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Editor of Grow Your Own magazine, Lucy Halsall – now Lucy
Chamberlain – sourced her own blooms for her wedding day.
Here's how she did it
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Posted by
Lucy Chamberlain
Thursday 17 July 2014
09.56 BST
theguardian.com
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Growing flowers for her wedding bouquet saved Lucy Chamberlain around £600.
Photograph: Rachel Callen
Let's face it – weddings are rather expensive things. Someone quoted
me £20k as the average figure recently, and blimey, I can well believe it. I
got married in June, and while we invested in the major things, like
caterers and a marquee, there was no way I could write out a huge
cheque for our wedding flowers. For someone without a big budget and
who is heavily involved in growing their own, it just wasn't an option. So,
back in October 2013, I set about my project – and the nuts and bolts of
it is we spent £200 for what should have cost us £800.
Please don't zone out if weddings aren't your thing – cut flowers can lift
any summer party or knees up, and just plonking a home-grown vase's
worth on your desk can be hugely uplifting. I learned loads of practical
tips for home cut flower production in the process, so let me divulge
them.
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Selection, sowing and growing on
My plan was to grow the filler
flowers and foliage – I wasn't up to
the stress of growing the
statement blooms (in my case,
roses and peonies) and in any
case, the cost of buying the stock
plants would have been more than
the florist's fee. Annual flowers and
herbs were my main theme –
cornflowers, larkspur, mint, golden
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oregano – with whites, pinks,
blues, purples and zesty greens
being the colour plan.
First to the herbs: these were dug
up last autumn and potted into 3litre pots. I scrimped divisions of
peppermint, oregano, variegated
The flowers after their transfer from
applemint, lemon balm and sage
drainpipes to growbags. Photograph:
from my mum's garden, along with
Lucy Chamberlain
some self-sown Alchemilla mollis
and perennial cornflowers (in
hindsight, foxgloves would have been handy, too). I used gritty compost
to keep these plants "hard and mean" – floppy foliage in the vase was
not on the cards. The pots were put in a sheltered spot outside, out of
reach of rabbits, then bought into an unheated greenhouse in March to
ensure the foliage wasn't battered by the weather. It worked a treat.
That's when I ordered the annuals.
I say ordered, I should confess
here that the marvellous folk at
Suttons Seeds sent me £20 worth
of seeds for sowing, plus extra
packets for making seed bomb
wedding favours (which went down
a treat but demanded very clear
labelling to avoid being eaten as
chocolate truffles). I chose robust
annuals – scabious, clary,
gypsophila, lupin (a gorgeous
scented annual variety called 'Pink
Fairy'), nigella ('Midnight Blue',
which is a stonker of a selection,
really deep blue) – plus a few
delicate things such as
antirrhinum, didiscus and stocks.
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Robust annuals such as lupins make
ideal homegrown wedding flowers.
Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain
Because annuals aren't keen on
root disturbance, I sowed into
lengths of drainpipe and then,
once germinated and thinned, also
in the unheated greenhouse, I (helped by my dad and other half) hoofed
them into pre-watered, pre-warmed growing bags. It worked – the plants
shrugged off any transplant shock and continued to romp away, just
demanding a daily light water.
Timings were always going to be a gamble (the didiscus and scabious
were tantalisingly in bud come the wedding day). If you have space, two
sowings a month apart would make a safer bet. Most annuals are
forgiving, though – once flowering, if you continue to cut them they'll
carry on producing new blooms (the only exclusion to this rule seemed to
be the stocks which stubbornly produced zero sideshoots despite half of
them being cut back a month before the wedding). So, come early June
the greenhouse was full of flowers. What a relief!
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On the Tuesday evening before the wedding, Lucy set off for some flower foraging
with her secateurs. Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain
I'm blessed to live in a village where there are lots of keen gardeners
(and I'm not too proud to ask), so on the Tuesday evening before the
wedding (a Saturday) we went off with our secateurs. Due to the warm
Evergreen shrubs
A collection of six evergreen shrubs. £17.35 each.
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Geranium collection
Geranium collection
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spring the cow parsley had gone over, but I'd been eyeing up a patch of
ground elder and it bloomed bang on time. We were generously donated
pinks, oxe-eye daisies, alstroemerias, foxgloves, roses (gorgeous, David
Austin-style varieties – a real result), red valerian and philadelphus – all
were ferried home pronto, stripped of their lower leaves and plunged up
to their necks in cold water (garden trugs worked brilliantly here, and
evening or morning harvest is said to be better than daytime cutting).
Mini fruit tree collection
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The following morning we
transported the blooms to a cool
garage, replenishing the water
daily. Come Thursday evening, a
team of fabulous volunteers
helped cut the growbag flowers
and deftly transform the whole
collection into fifty table vases,
three bouquets, a little flowergirl
basket, two corsages, four
buttonholes, two pedestals and
four tent pole displays. It was in
itself a thoroughly enjoyable
evening, and led to the big day
being hugely personal, so I can
thoroughly recommend the
experience.
The finished table decorations.
Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain
(I also made my own confetti out of
flower petals, which saved me £50,
but reckon that I've run out of
room here to write about it. If anyone wants to know, just ask).
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• Lucy Chamberlain is the editor of Grow Your Own magazine, which
contains a wealth of information about growing your own vegetables.
There are even more resources on the website, including the new
growing guides section. Follow Lucy on Twitter at @bramble36
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