Christchurch
What greater pleasure – and responsibility – for a gardener than to grow the flowers for a darling daughter’s wedding
Mary Lovell-Smith grows blooms for her daughter’s wedding
The trials were, well, trying, but the results, thanks to a legion of friends and family, were glorious. Nellie wanted a simple country wedding (well, as simple as you can get with 180-plus guests) with wild (or rather wild-looking) flowers.
It seemed simple enough.
We perused the seed catalogue, selecting annuals of the colour and effect she wanted. I ordered them, prepared the beds at home and on a sister’s farm in Lyttelton Harbour.
Then I sowed according to how long each flower would take to reach maturity, and sowed successively over a month in an attempt to account for the biggest and most uncontrollable variable, the weather. What could go wrong? Well, the first batch of bells of Ireland ( Moluccella laevis) seeds drowned in a cold July. Note to self – soaking seed-raising mix in water prior to sowing and wrapping in plastic bags may be fine in spring, never do it in a sunless winter. Germination rate in the second batch – in damp soil, sans plastic – was way higher.
Second lesson learnt was that you cannot control growth rates. Seeds sown up to a month apart readily caught up with each other once in the garden.
Except for nigella, that is, which curiously, although planted at roughly the same time in both gardens, advanced at different rates in each. Neither coincided with the mid-February wedding. Handily, pre- and post-bloom the plants provide pretty buds and seed heads.
Third was that the prevailing winds in my garden, a cool easterly, has about the same effect on growth as the less frequent but more bitterly cold Antarctic southerly, the main wind in my sister’s garden.
Fourth was one packet of seed goes a long way – many packets go too far. I ran out of room for many of the faster-growing flowers such as cleome and cosmos.
And fifth was that seeds sown direct should be scattered thinly and maybe not in rows. I did far too much thinning and replanting (I could have chucked the thinnings but biffing things is not in my nature).
Top performers were by far bishop’s flower, mignonette and the pretty green bells of Ireland,
all of which bloomed prolifically over several weeks.
Biggest disappointment was the sweet peas.
Planted in early November, two types of blue and black ones failed to ever thrive, possibly the soil was too heavy. The third type, Lathyrus sativus, did well and produced the most beautiful sky-blue flowers, but alack they were only the size of my little fingernail. Nonetheless, these were picked, dried and added to the dried rose petals we made for confetti.
We chose ‘Smokey Eyes’, a pale larkspur, but serendipitously it was mixed colours, which added colour to the tables.
I probably chose the rhoeas poppy for its name, ‘Bridal Silk’, but, like the white opium poppy, its seedheads were more useful than the flowers themselves, which proved too delicate and short-lived to be much use.
And while the orlaya flowered far too early, the linum is still to do its thing.
Achillea ‘Double Pearl’ and an annual apricot aster were pretty ho-hum performers. The sea holly we had hoped to get from a florist never arrived so I did end up buying several bunches of other flowers “just in case”.
It was never intended we grow all the flowers for the wedding.
Nellie had visions of gathering wild flowers along the roadside and raiding friends’ gardens for blooms and foliage too, and every time I fretted about how mine were growing I think she must have roped in another friend.
For come Friday when we decorated the old hall, we were nearly overwhelmed with flowers and foliage from family and friends’ gardens – hydrangeas, roses, zinnias, elderberries, boughs of oak and kowhai, of pears laden with tiny fruit, muehlenbeckia to run down the tables, ivy to swag the chandeliers, bulrush and poppy seedheads, fresh and dried… the list goes on.
Every room, the loos, the porches, kitchen, had at least one vase full; every ledge, table, and shelf. And still we had some over. These we put in big decorated buckets along the front of the stage.
If growing flowers was rewarding, being part of the merry troupe of amazing friends and family transforming the hall into a chamber befitting a medieval banquet was great fun.
And the most satisfying part of the whole process? Nellie’s comments as we turned to look at the completed hall. “This is perfect, exactly as I imagined.”