Growing wedding flowers

It has been a while since I’ve added details from our wedding day to the blog, so I thought it was about time I shared some more pictures. With the first signs of Spring well and truly on their way, I thought it might be nice to provide a post on some of the planting decoration from our wedding.

We wanted to embrace the location of the wedding and play with the English Country Garden idea. I love flowers and plants that are found in wild flower meadows and old walled gardens, and I wanted to incorporate these into our wedding. We were also heavily inspired by the wonderful Petersham Nurseries, and their beautiful plants and flowers.

We decorated the area outside of the marquee with a multitude of plants and flowers, many of which we grew from seedlings specifically for the wedding. We decided on the plants and flowers we wanted, and made sure they were likely to be flowering or at least alive at the time of the wedding and set to work planting and potting them up.

From the garden centre we bought little Cosmos, different coloured Dahlias, delphiniums, scabious, lavender, stocks and lots of different herbs including: mint, rosemary, thyme, verbena. These we potted and kept a close eye on as they blossomed and grew new leaves and flowers in the run up to the wedding. We also bought a number of wild seed packets and nasturtiums that we planted in a variety of tubs and containers. In addition to this we bought a number of little strawberry plants which survived remarkably well considering the bad weather, and grew very large and fruited just in time for the wedding, which was wonderful.

We used the herbs as part of the place settings for our guests at the tables and we used the nasturtiums in the salads.

We collected lots of planting containers from ebay and Etsy and borrowed all sorts of items from friends and family including old metal watering cans and wooden crates to use as planters. We also visited Sunbury Antiques, where we bought a number of pots and trays to display plants and flowers in.  In order to bring a bit of extra colour to the displays, Paul collected used cooking oil drums from the local Chinese restaurant that we used to plant things up in. He also made wooden planters from wood leftover from my sisters flooring.

Although at times during the year the rain tried to kill a lot of the flowers, they were worth all the effort as they looked fantastic. Not only were they beautiful on the day, but we were able to keep them after the wedding, and our garden looks amazing now!

Here are some images taken just before the guests arrived….

If you like the idea of growing some of your own wedding flowers and plants, speak to your local garden centre, or do a bit of research online into flowers and plants that are at their best around the time of your wedding. Don’t be put off if you’ve never done any gardening before, we hadn’t really, and we really enjoyed learning something new together.

Alternatively if you’d like to try your hand at growing your very own cut wedding flowers and would like some practical lessons and tips there are a number of lovely companies in the lovely The Natural Wedding Company directory that offer courses including:

Blooming Green Flowers – Kent
Common Farm Flowers – Somerset
Catkin Flowers – Lincolnshire
The Garden Gate Flower Company – Cornwall
Green and Gorgeous Flowers – Oxfordshire

If you’d like to see more of our wedding take a look over on Love My Dress, and keep an eye out here, as I’ll be adding lots more details soon.

Image Credits:

Images: 1, 8,9,10,11 The wonderful Mark Tattersall

Images: 2,3,4,5,6,7 My Own.