Lots of people commented on, and have asked about my wedding bouquet. So I thought I would dedicate a page to it.
Firstly, and the thing I am most proud of is that everything in my both mine and my sisters bouquets was home grown. There were some items that came from my mum’s garden, the peonys and roses, everything else came from my garden. Considering that our garden was mostly concrete in 2012, and we got married in 2013 this is quite an achievement.
In my bouquet:
Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ – This is the cute little orange flower you can see. Easy to grow and I now have 3 or 4 Geums in the garden include the well-known ‘Mrs Bradshaw’, which is red. If you keep cutting they keep coming, so these were flowers that made it into my bouquet, and into many more flower arrangements for the party and the house for quite a few months after the wedding. I have also used this as the basis for my new hot bed. Not your traditional hot bed, but it is to be full of reds, oranges and yellows. I have made a start on this bed and it’s progress will be one of the things I hope to post about this year.
Cornflowers – Annual Cornflowers, gorgeous blue colour and a firm favourite of mine. I now have a range of annual and perennial cornflowers in the garden, another blue, a white and hoping to add a deep burgundy this year.
I adore plants that also have green flowers. My garden has a variety of Euphorbias with gorgeous green flowers, however, the sap can be an irritant and so we decided it might not be the best thing for us to be holding on my wedding day. Two plants came to the rescue – bupleurum rotundifolium and nicotiana langsdorffii. Both are annuals, I am undecided whether I will grow them again this year, although I may not have much choice with the nicotiana which deposited a significant amount of seed in the corner where it lived. They were lovely plants, and very easy to grow.
I wanted something to keep me grounded and calm during the day. My garden does this, as does gardening, but the thing that really helped was the scented plants I used in the bouquet. I try to use scented plants in my garden wherever possible. I am a big fan of scented pelargoniums, lavender and of course sweet peas, to mention just a few. The pelargoniums don’t really lend themselves to a bouquet, however the sweet peas and the lavender were essential components and it was lovely to get a waft of these throughout my day.
Bethan’s Bouquet
As well as some of the same filler plants, Bethan’s bouquet included Ladys Mantle. We focussed this bouquet around the peonies from a garden that used to be mine and has since been taken over by my sister. These are the large beautiful pink flowers you can see. Surrounding these were some more sweet peas, and achillea red velvet. The achillea is fantastic. I grow a couple of different colours and I will be adding to the collection this year. Its so easy to look after, divides easily and if you don’t mind the look can be left for many weeks, as the colour slowly fades – something which I think adds to the beauty of the plant. If you don’t like the faded colour as much, just keep cutting it and it produces many more clusters of the tiny pink flowers for a long while, especially with the weather we had last year, I was still cutting this and getting flowers well into the autumn.
