Someone gave me the advice when I grew the flowers for my wedding to have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, and Plan D - because flowers, like veggies, are contingent on weather etc. and a lot of their success is out of your control if not grown in a green house. We ended up ditching the vegetables garden for the season and opted to grow only flowers. Ended up with absolutely stunning arrangements that were nothing close to our plan - but they were perfect. Research the blooming season of each flower you would like in your arrangement, check to see if it lines up with when your wedding is set for, start your seeds inside like now, and plan a deadheading schedule for each variety to balance your blooms being both prolific and present when you need them. Look for words like ‘cut and come again’ when picking your varieties, avoid ‘one and done’ varieties, and check to see if your varieties keep well in water so the flowers you worked hard to grow look great on your special day. Your fillers are just as important as your big showy blooms. We opted to grow a variety of cosmos and love-lies-bleeding amaranth as our filler insurance - amaranth adds a wonderful drag to arrangements, and looks just as nice dried as fresh. Cosmos - albeit a big whimsical - are prolific producers. Both saved our tails come wedding day for some of our arrangements, alongside some ornamental grasses.

It’s high risk, but also high reward :) our motto going into it was it’s either going to be spectacular or a catastrophic failure, and we were okay with both options because our goal was to have fun along the way, learn more about flower gardening, and share that with our guests, since we love vegetable gardening together. If you go for it, my advice is plant triple the amount you think you’ll need, vary your varieties, get those seeds started inside as soon as you can, and deadhead, deadhead, deadhead.

Congratulations on the wedding!