The Iowa Gardener: Want garden-only flowers for your wedding? What to know

This month I'm helping yet another young couple pull together garden flowers for their wedding. They're getting married in late June and want to do something creative, local, and honestly — cheap.

Good for them. Those are all excellent reasons to rely on local garden flowers for your wedding, but I've done garden flowers for a number of weddings, drawing from my own garden for the bulk of them, and I've learned a lot of things over the years.

If you've never gardened before, or have gardened just a little, don't decide that you are going to grow all your own wedding flowers. There are too many variables.

Case in point: The couple I'm helping this month decided a year ago they'd plant a few peony bushes so that they would have enough for an entire wedding in 12 months. Little did they know that peonies need a good two to three years to get established and several years to produce lots and lots of blooms. Even then, they’d need flowers from probably 20 bushes, not, say, six.

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Get help

If you are a novice gardener, enlist in the help of an established flower gardener who is willing to help — or better yet, simply do everything. Perhaps there is a family member or good friend? I've done this multiple times, and it's involved enough that I've offered it as my wedding present, with profuse thanks from the couple.

Use live flowers in pots

Consider live flowers in pots, rather than cut flowers, for tables. There are so many live plants that are beautiful in bloom and work well on tables: begonias, cyclamen, azaleas, mini daffodils, tulips, mini roses, mums, pansies — the list goes on and on. Even greenery like ferns or ivies can make a gorgeous, low centerpiece. All are less work and fuss than cut flowers. Even little 4-inch pots of flowering plants, which retail for around $6 or so each, can make an impact.

Pro tip: Rather than nurture the plants for months yourself, order the plants in advance from a quality greenhouse and specify that they need to be in bloom. That way, you can pick them up a week or two before the event and they will be in tiptop shape. All you have to do is slip them into the pots purchased in advance. The pros also can usually get you flowering plants year-round, so you don't have to rely on the weather.

Be flexible

If you have a strict color scheme, that will make garden-only flowers far more challenging. One of the most difficult weddings I did had a color scheme of magenta and chartreuse.

The bride this month I'm helping originally wanted only peonies, but the wedding isn't until late June. And peonies stop blooming in early to mid-June. With luck, the peonies I and others are chilling in our fridges will keep. But if not, the bride is prepared to take whatever else is available from my and other's gardens then.

Be resourceful

With various weddings I've done, I've found ways to make the flowers from my garden or from the florist go farther. With a September wedding, I relied on flowers from my garden and a local florist. But the goldenrod in the ditches was also at its peak, so I cut armloads of that as well. Queen Anne's lace, wild sunflowers, and cattails are other good “ditch flowers” to consider.

Just be sure that whatever you cut is something that is otherwise considered a weed — it's invasive — and that it's not on private land.

Have a Plan B

Flowers rely on nature and nature is extremely unreliable. Bloom times vary from year to year. An attack of Japanese beetles or a herd of deer can wipe out certain flowers. Too much rain or too little can cause things to rot or to shrivel and die.

So even if you are planning on, say, growing a ton of zinnias for your August wedding or cutting all the daffodils from your grandfather's acreage, make contact in advance with a florist or greenhouse so that if, a month or even a couple of weeks before you need to place a semi-emergency order, you and they are prepared.

Or maybe you order the must-have flowers, like the bridal bouquet, from a florist and for the tables, you have only candles if the flowers don’t pan out.

Weddings are wonderful, and having lovely local flowers that don't break the bank adds to the specialness of the event. But weddings are also stressful, so keep your sanity and plan for local flowers in a way that lets you relax and enjoy the big day.

Veronica Lorson Fowler is co-publisher of the Iowa Gardener website at www.theiowagardener.com.