Wedding planning and garden planning: floral display ideas for spring wedding flowers that won’t ruin the budget.
One of the aspects of garden design is to do with planning the present and future garden. This requires you, or your garden designer, to look at your garden in a particular way.
Planning ahead for both gardens and weddings, maybe a step too far for those involved. Plews can help, working with the bride and wedding planner. This is especially important where the bride would like at least some of the wedding flowers to be home grown, or British grown. Perhaps the reception is to take place in the garden, so it has to be a stunning backdrop to the celebrations.
Spring Wedding Flowers
Growing your own wedding flowers obviously needs to be planned in advance. It may not suit everyone for reasons of space, time or lack of know-how. Floral displays, bouquets and buttonholes play a leading role in the decoration of a church or a wedding venue, and they can take up a large part of the budget.
A couple of suggestions to reduce the budget without compromising on style.
Firstly – Grow Your Own
Growing many or all of the flowers yourself can be a huge saving. Especially so i fthey are flowers that can be grown from seed. Or you could ask green fingered family members to grow some of the flowers for you. This spreads the responsibility.
Secondly – Re-use
Use foliage and flowering plants that can be transplanted into the newlyweds’ garden after the big event. This provides a living memory of the happy day and personalising their garden at the same time. Indeed, sharing the plants around the newlyweds and their parents’ gardens, would be a lovely memento for all to enjoy for years after.
As for some ideas for Spring wedding flowers, the following extract from “In Your Spring Garden” gives some inspiration. There are more planting and floral ideas in the eBook.
“For scent and an air of delicate romance, low hanging baskets and raised planters filled with sweet violets (viola odorata) would be lovely. A traditional Valentines’ Day flower, their heart shaped leaves are as apt on a wedding day. Their ‘retro’ feel would work well with a vintage chic inspired wedding breakfast theme. As British natives that flower from mid February to May, they would be happy outside and inside, although their scent would be more noticeable in the warmth.
If you have a marquee, you could have terracotta troughs filled with low clipped hedging of Buxus sempervirens (Box) surrounding the soft apricot tones of Narcissus ‘Replete’. Both these designs balance the femininity of the frilly, soft hued daffodils with the more formal masculinity of the clipped hedging.”
Spring bulbs for Spring Wedding Flowers
Bulbs are reliable spring wedding flowers as they respond well to being forced, or speeded up, and held back. This means that a wide range of colours and flowers and scent can be made available.
We call them spring bulbs when we need to buy and plant them in the autumn; I’m not surprised that so many people get confused. If you think of them as ‘spring flowering bulbs’ it can help, but you still need to know that future garden planning is needed.
We can think of bulbs as either cut flowers to decorate the church and venue, or as potted and border flowers to adorn the brides home and impress wedding guests.
Planting bulbs in the border requires thought as to what else will be on show when the bulbs are flowering. When designing a border to include bulbs for spring wedding flowers, I would plant herbaceous perennials for the bulbs to grow through. These will have only some foliage when the bulbs are in flower, but this be more decorative than bare earth. Choosing a complementary mix of leaf shape and colour will offer carpet to complement the colourful flowering bulbs.
Growing the bulbs in pots allows for them to be forced or held back so that they are more likely to be in full bloom for the wedding reception. The pots can be free standing or placed within a border.
Wedding Flower Inspiration
As for inspiration for spring wedding flowers and floral displays, some of the Plews team are off to view a modern art exhibition. This is not as odd as you might think, the colour combinations can be exciting.
If you’d like a border planting design or a total re-think of your whole garden, why not get in touch?
And for more on garden design and gardening tips, why not download our eBook “In Your Spring Garden”? Available to purchase directly from Plews website.
