The Cut Flower Podcast

How to Grow Your Own Wedding Flowers

• Roz Chandler • Season 1 • Episode 109

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Text Agony Aunt Roz with your Cutflower Questions.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Cut Flower Podcast! I’m Roz Chandler, and today we’re diving into one of my favourite topics, growing your own wedding or event flowers. Whether you’re planning for a big day or just dreaming about it, I’m here to show you how personal, cost-effective, and rewarding it can be to grow your own blooms.

Episode Highlights

Why Grow Your Own Wedding Flowers?
There are so many wonderful reasons to grow your own flowers for your wedding or event:

  1. Save Money: Did you know couples in the UK spend between £1,800 and £2,500 on wedding flowers? Growing your own can cut that significantly.
  2. Love Gardening: If you or your family enjoys gardening, why not put that passion to work?
  3. Make It Personal: There’s nothing like the feeling of creating something special and meaningful for your big day.
  4. Embrace the Challenge: It’s such a satisfying project to take on, and you’ll have plenty of support from friends, family, and local flower farmers.

Planning for Success

  • Envision Your Style: Romantic pastels, bold brights, or wild, rustic vibes?
  • Focus on Timing: Work backwards from your wedding date to ensure flowers are at their peak.
  • Allow Enough Time: Plan for at least 12–18 months for a successful harvest.

What You’ll Learn

I shared tips to make the process manageable and enjoyable:

  • Best Annuals to Grow: Sweet peas, cosmos, snapdragons, and cornflowers are some of my favorites. They’re easy to grow and bring a lot of beauty to your arrangements.
  • Perennials to Consider: For weddings further out, think about roses, dahlias, and peonies. They get better with age—just like us!
  • Foliage Matters: Don’t forget about eucalyptus, herbs, and pittosporum to add texture and depth.
  • Cutting and Conditioning: Learn how to cut flowers early, hydrate them properly, and keep them fresh for the big day.

Join the Community

I’d love to invite you to our free Facebook group, the Cut Flower Kickoff 2025, where you’ll find guides, tips, and live "fireside chats" throughout January. Plus, we’re hosting three online masterclasses in February to help you get started.


[00:00:00] Roz Chandler: Hi and welcome to the Cut Flower podcast. And today we're going to be talking about wedding or event blooms and about growing your own flowers for weddings or for your own events. But before we dive in, I'd love to invite you Facebook group.

[00:00:17] Roz Chandler: It's the hub of our flower growing community. And every January we kick off the year with loads of free resources to help you succeed. Plus we run three online masterclasses in this group from the 6th to 7th and 10th of February to provide even more help and guidance. If you're ready to dive deeper, our eight month Seed to Vars course offers everything you need to master the art of growing and arranging your own blooms.

[00:00:44] Roz Chandler: But in the first instance, do join us in our free Facebook group. So it's facebook. com forward slash groups forward slash the cut flower kickoff 2025 and that link will be in the show note in show notes. We do have a series of five podcasts starting today going from the 3rd of January and going right into the beginning of February starting with this one to get you going.

[00:01:10] Roz Chandler: So here we'll talk about growing as we've talked about growing the wedding flowers and we'll talk about the floristry side will be in the Facebook group. So this The session today is all about growing your own wedding flowers. So a question, and a question I've got for you. Why would you grow your own wedding or event flowers?

[00:01:32] Roz Chandler: And there are so many reasons why people decide to do this, and people I've met through the years that have decided to grow their own. The first one is, of course, the cost. So the couples in the UK now spend anywhere between eighteen hundred and two and a half thousand on average on wedding blooms and obviously it can be much higher than that.

[00:01:55] Roz Chandler: You can of course save by doing this yourselves. You may decide to just do the venue and the church and hire a florist to handle the bridal party, the bouquets and buttonholes. Obviously that's less stress. You certainly don't want to be doing your bouquets and buttonholes on the morning of your wedding.

[00:02:12] Roz Chandler: But in order to do your venue or you're doing bud vases or you're doing pedestals in a church, you can most certainly grow all the blooms you need. So that's the first reason, cost. The second reason, you love gardening or your family love gardening and you come from a family of gardeners. Why wouldn't you grow your own wedding flowers?

[00:02:35] Roz Chandler: The third reason and probably the nicest reason is it feels really personal and something lovely for you to do, for you to contribute, for you to grow, for you to nurture your own wedding flowers into something that you can use on your wedding day. What a lovely thought. And also, the fourth reason, probably, is because you love a challenge.

[00:02:56] Roz Chandler: Don't worry if you can't grow everything you need. There'll be friends and families and neighbours there to help you. You can also purchase top ups from your local flower farmers. There is a network of these globally. So in the US, and I'm a member of it, it's called the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.

[00:03:17] Roz Chandler: A S C F G and in the UK it's called Flowers from the Farm and I believe they have nearly a thousand members now. So don't worry about whether you've grown absolutely everything and you have all the foliage you need. Just go, give it a go. Grow as much as you can and then you can always buy in from other UK farmers.

[00:03:39] Roz Chandler: Growers if you're in the UK or US in for you US. And then if you look elsewhere globally, I know there are flower farmers all over the globe. So they're the top four reasons why you grow your own cut flowers. Costs, you love gardening, it feels very personal, something lovely to do and you really love a challenge.

[00:03:56] Roz Chandler: How do you plan for success? The first step is envisaging your wedding. Now you must have been planning this for a while and you're thinking about the vibe and is it romantic pastels or bold brights or something rustic and wild? Once you have a sense of your style, consider your wedding date. This will help choose flowers that are at the peak for your day.

[00:04:19] Roz Chandler: Of course, the date is the most important thing when we are growing cut flowers. Is it spring? Is it tulips? Is it all the bulbs? Is it muscari? Is it narcissi? Ranunculus? Are we moving into the summer where we have a plethora of flowers to choose from? Going into the autumn where flowers are a lot darker in colour, so we get all the oranges, we get some yellows, we get the bronzes, we just have a real autumnal feel.

[00:04:44] Roz Chandler: Or are we heading towards a winter wedding, which can be hugely romantic? This will determine what you grow. I would always say go for your wedding date first and plan backwards in your growing. So if, for instance, you're having a wedding in 2025, then you need to start growing in March 2025, but you'll be limited to annuals and you'll be able to do some dailyers, but obviously it's too late then if you're getting married, in the spring of 25 to be thinking about tulips and narcissis and so on.

[00:05:19] Roz Chandler: So it's all in the planning and working backwards. So you really need a good year, probably 18 months to have a, to be able to provide everything for your wedding. So what's your essential toolkit to get you started? Obviously you need a dedicated growing space. And this could be a garden, this could be your garden beds, it could be in pots, or it could be on an allotment, or you might be lucky to have more space.

[00:05:47] Roz Chandler: You might have a field or something which you can dedicate to a cut flower growing area. Then you need to think about seeds and plants and what you actually want to grow. You won't need to rush off and buy seeds because you won't be planting them now until March. And if you're looking at direct sow seeds, you won't be direct sowing them towards, until the, towards the end of April.

[00:06:10] Roz Chandler: So really there's no rush on seeds and plants. Then you need to think about tools like seed trays, compost and then some protective fleece for those chilly nights. So if you're setting your seeds off under cover in March, for instance, you might want some fleece to protect them and tuck them up for the night.

[00:06:29] Roz Chandler: It can be quite overwhelming when you think about growing for your cut flowers for your wedding, so break down the workload. Growing wedding flowers might seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. It isn't an all or nothing. Decide what you want to create. Will you DIY everything or just focus on growing statement flowers like sweet peas or dahlias?

[00:06:49] Roz Chandler: while supplementing them with a, from a florist. Neighbours and friends will be happy to help. So start, I would start with a vision board. What do you want it to look like? What are your, what's your style? What time of year is it? Start googling all the sort of things that are around at that time of year and the look that you like.

[00:07:08] Roz Chandler: Create a Pinterest board, a vision board, and then talk to neighbours and friends and people who live locally to you and see what flowers they have. There's nothing better than to provide, to somebody a neighbour will be more than happy to help you. Providing their wedding flowers. So let's go back to what to grow.

[00:07:28] Roz Chandler: So if you're looking for 2025 weddings, then your annuals are a brilliant choice for beginners and offer a wealth of blooms. You can get them in a single growing season because an annual means obviously it has its life has its whole life in one year. That's what I'm trying to say. So if you're growing in March, you need to prioritize your annuals.

[00:07:49] Roz Chandler: So things like beautiful sweet peas. They're perfect for bouquets and arches. Their fragrance is a showstopper. They fill bud vases down the tables in a marquee. And they are an amazing scent and colour choice. So sweet peas, definitely. Cosmos. These are airy flowers. They grow really tall and they look stunning in arrangements.

[00:08:11] Roz Chandler: They come in lots and lots of different shades of pinks, brights, whites. We grew here on the farm about seven different varieties of cosmos and I would say it was our most productive, certainly one of our most productive flowers and certainly the one that was highest in demand. So definitely cosmos.

[00:08:30] Roz Chandler: Snapdragons, they always add height to everything. They're quite a cottage flower. And they add height, structure, and they're available in vibrant colours. So right from the pinks, the whites, all the way up to the dark pinks. So I would always add snapdragons in. Cornflower gives you the idea for a wildflower vibe.

[00:08:51] Roz Chandler: Works beautifully in buttonholes. It comes in lots of different, you've got the vibrant blues, you've got pinks, you've got whites, you've got a lilac colour, but cornflowers. And I would probably add to that list, nigellas and scabies. So they're your nice, annuals that you can grow very easily and you can either set them off in March undercover or you can do direct sow outside, which is even easier.

[00:09:18] Roz Chandler: Then, perennials, obviously if you've got 2025 wedding, it's very difficult to have any perennials with the exception of dahlias. which would be growing in May and would be flowering in August. But generally, perennials need to be around for a while to be, for you to be able to pick from them. So if your wedding is planned for 2026 or beyond, you can invest in perennials.

[00:09:44] Roz Chandler: These plants return year after year and obviously improve with age, a bit like me. I would look at peonies if you're getting married in June, but it's a May June wedding really. Peonies only have a three week life cycle. They're not around for very long, so unless you're getting married at that, it's Complete time.

[00:10:03] Roz Chandler: I would probably avoid peonies they are quite stressful. Roses, obviously, choose repeat flower varieties, you get a season long that way. My favourite is, we tend to grow David Austin roses here. My favourites are William and Catherine, Patience, and then my all time is Queen of Sweden, just because of its beautiful pink colour.

[00:10:27] Roz Chandler: Delphiniums. Of course, if you're going to do big, tall arrangements, you're going to do pedestals or urn arrangements in a church. They're tall, they're elegant, and they create drama. And a delphinium is a truly cottage flower, a truly British cottage flower, is a delphinium. And then you've obviously got dahlias.

[00:10:45] Roz Chandler: Again, thousands of different varieties of dahlias. There's a dahlia for everybody, a colour for everybody. And you can plant those as soon as the frost, fear of any frost is, has gone. So we're looking at May and then they will come into flower. in mid to late August. So again, it's about planning towards your date and your wedding date.

[00:11:07] Roz Chandler: So foliage, this is the unsung hero, really. Foliage is the thing that I suggest everybody grows lots of. You can never grow too much foliage. It frames all your flowers and it adds loads of texture. Now the easy ones to grow are eucalyptus. It's a silvery foliage in the main that adds sophistication but eucalyptus can only really be picked in the UK, again quite important to know, between October and March.

[00:11:35] Roz Chandler: So it's going into a winter wedding which is why eucalyptus is used in lots of reefs and so on. It is not a summer foliage. Eucalyptus is too tender at its tips to be a summer foliage. Eucalyptus is an Australian plant and obviously loves heat and temperature to get its growth and then it's ready and hardy to pick from October onwards.

[00:11:57] Roz Chandler: I would grow loads and loads of herbs especially if you're going to do bud vases because they will fill them. There's borage which has a little blue flower on it, lots and lots of different types of mint from chocolate apple mint. There's Rosemary, that's definitely, you can add into all of your arrangements.

[00:12:17] Roz Chandler: There's Bay. I would definitely look at herbs to supplement all of your flowers for your weddings. They're fragrant, they're versatile, and things like Rosemary are really useful in buttonholes. And you may find that your neighbours and friends have already got Rosemary shrubs, and that all you need to grow is Mint.

[00:12:36] Roz Chandler: And mint is just so prolific. Be very careful because it will take over, but it's great if well hydrated and used in weddings. Pittosporum is another great one. It's great for adding fullness and arrangements. You can have a Variated Pittosporum, which adds a bit of different kind of texture and color.

[00:12:55] Roz Chandler: So it depends, obviously, when you are planning your wedding. So if you are planning your spring wedding in 2026, you would be laying the foundations in 2025 for tulips, Oculus and Narcissi in November, for instance. That you might purchase in September. If you're planning your wedding for autumn 2025, then you will be thinking about dailies and looking around to see what foliage you already have growing or what your neighbors and friends have.

[00:13:23] Roz Chandler: You will be looking at lots of annuals, Cosmos, definitely, and you would be planning towards that. So it's about planning backwards. So I just say, put the date in your diary, plan backwards of when you actually grow everything. Thanks. I do have a cut flower planner which is available on Amazon and it's called the Cut Flower Planner.

[00:13:44] Roz Chandler: If you'd like to take a look at that, that will plan your year out for you and certainly help if you're looking towards an event or a wedding. So where do you start? This is all quite overwhelming. Really don't do anything until March. By March it's time to roll up your sleeves and get started. Start with hardy annuals indoors.

[00:14:07] Roz Chandler: Use seed trays and a sunny windowsill to germinate seeds like sweet peas and snapdragons. You may have a small polytunnel you may have a cold frame outside, but windowsill is equally as good if you don't have a greenhouse or a polytunnel. Start to prepare where you're going to grow. What does this look like?

[00:14:26] Roz Chandler: Improve the soil with compost or well rotted manure. And the manure needs to be well rotted by six months or more. Set up protection. Use fleece or clutches to keep your plants safe from frost. Certainly very early on in the year, frost can catch you very unawares. Get inspired. Start having a look at some books, some seed catalogues.

[00:14:49] Roz Chandler: Just have a play. Start to get the vision board sorted out with all your colours. And then, if you don't start off your hardy annuals indoors, you can direct sow in late April into raised beds or prepared plots. So things like Ami, Cornflowers, Nigella, Scabious can all be direct sown. So don't worry if you don't start kickoff in March, you still have plenty of time.

[00:15:17] Roz Chandler: It will all catch up with itself. One question I quite often get asked is how do I know how much to grow? How do I know what stem counts I'm going to need of each? And so what we decided to do, and I will add this in the Facebook group that I talked about earlier, I'll put a guide on wedding flowers and I will go in there and talk about stem counts.

[00:15:41] Roz Chandler: Because you need to know, for instance, in a bud vase, how many stem counts do you need? On average, it's five to seven. And what are they? Are they three foliage to five flowers? And what flowers would you use? And therefore how many bud vases you need along that table in your marquee for instance?

[00:15:59] Roz Chandler: And therefore how many you actually have to grow? Now bear in mind that every seed packet you buy has loads more seeds than you will ever grow. It's, the reason it's done like that is because it's easier for the manufacturer to put the seeds into the envelopes like that. It doesn't mean you have to grow them all.

[00:16:16] Roz Chandler: I think a cornflower seed packet comes to 500 seeds. Now, 500 cornflowers is a lot of cornflowers. So I will put that guide in the Facebook group. Next question, what to grow? Of course, we've gone over this, but it really depends when your wedding is. Whether you have a spring or summer or autumn or winter, think about what you want your wedding to look like.

[00:16:43] Roz Chandler: When we talk about spring flowers, they tend to be very pale. They tend to be white. And then we introduce tulips. And there can be anything in tulips from black to white and anything in between. So think about what sort of colours you want. If you're going into autumn we've got the darker tones, we've got copper colours and oranges and a very sort of autumnal colours.

[00:17:06] Roz Chandler: If we're going to winter we're looking at chrysanthemums and berries and eucalyptus. Much more wintry. So have a think about what you want this to look like and therefore what you want to grow. So once you've made a list, have a chat with your friends and neighbours. Show them your mood board and see what they have growing in their gardens.

[00:17:28] Roz Chandler: And don't forget that you need a mixture of foliage, fillers and focals. So the foliage is the greenery part, if you like. The fillers are your airy, fairy sort of amy, mages, nice sort of fillers. And your focals are your main things like roses or delphiniums or dahlias. Yes, we said start to grow in March, but don't panic if you don't.

[00:17:50] Roz Chandler: You can always direct sow coming into April. I think, early on in the year, just think about where you're going to have this. Start to prepare the ground, clear it of weeds. You may decide you want to go the no dig method. So that's made famous really by Charles Dowding. And really that's about laying across your, let's say you have a raised bed, laying cut a cardboard across it and then having a six to seven inches worth of compost on top that you grow into and therefore the weeds are actually underneath the cardboard and you won't be fighting the weeds.

[00:18:24] Roz Chandler: And also it keeps the moisture down, moisture in as well. So the no dig method is definitely something to look at. That will be, really easy to do in raised beds or in a garden bed that you've got. So we've talked about direct sowing seeds. We've talked about growing undercover.

[00:18:41] Roz Chandler: We've talked about the kind of things you're going to grow. And we've talked about the fact, planning backwards is probably the best thing you can do. And then going forward, you want to think about cutting and conditioning. Oh my goodness, when am I going to cut all this? And when am I going to condition?

[00:18:57] Roz Chandler: And how am I going to do it? It's quite important. So if you're getting married on a Saturday, We would, as wedding florists here, we would probably start to cut on a Wednesday, depending on what we're cutting. Definitely Wednesday or Thursday. And we'd cut all our foliage, and we'd cut all our flowers, and we would, what we would call, condition them and hydrate them for 24 hours before we even start to work with them.

[00:19:21] Roz Chandler: And that's what you need to do. The one thing you need to watch, of course, is the temperature. So if you're in the height of summer, Where are you going to store these flowers? It needs to either be in air conditioning, or it needs to be in a dark, cool place. Somewhere in your house, or somewhere that you've got in a shed, but it needs to be cool.

[00:19:40] Roz Chandler: And it, because what you don't, flowers like to be like at a really low temperature and they don't want to be subjected to 30 degrees heat. So just bear that one in mind when you're working with them. So we tend to cut all of our flowers early in the morning, so that's when they're most hydrated.

[00:19:57] Roz Chandler: We cut them with clean, sharp scissors. We don't use secateurs and secateurs unless we've got a really woody stem. We cut them into immaculately clean buckets, and by that either brand new buckets that you're going to fill three quarters full of water, And you're going to add a Milton tablet to it to make sure it's completely well disinfected and you cut straight into that bucket.

[00:20:20] Roz Chandler: Now there are a couple of different ways of cutting and conditioning some odd things. So if you think about woody stems or roses, generally, that's what we're trying to do, we would cut up the stem to maximize the water uptake and we cut straight up the stem from the bottom, maybe two or three inches, and then we would do what we call sear it.

[00:20:42] Roz Chandler: And what I mean by searing is you drop it in boiling hot water for about 10 seconds and then you put it in cool water. So you've seared of it and you've basically, you'll see all the air bubbles coming out the bottom of the plant where you've cut it and you've allowed the water to go up the plant so it's about maximum hydration.

[00:21:01] Roz Chandler: So think about searing as well as for some species. Generally, yeah, always roses, Echinacea, we always sear and Some woody foliage. Hydrangeas are another weird one. Hydrangeas absorb their water through their petals. And we tend to put them in a bath and then weigh them down for overnight so that they absorb lots and lots of water.

[00:21:27] Roz Chandler: And the only other weird one you've got is hollow stemmed. Things like delphiniums, lupins. Because they're tall flowers and the water has to go up an awful long way. So there are two things we do. We put a pin prick at the top, just at the top of where the delphinium is, so it draws the water up. And the second thing we'll do is we'll plug the delphinium or the lupine.

[00:21:50] Roz Chandler: So we'll make sure that it's full of water, either by turning it upside down and filling it from a jug or we'll, and, or we'll make sure that we've got it under the water and the water's going up and then we'll put a little cotton wool plug at the bottom so the water remains in the stem so the stem sends really turgid.

[00:22:07] Roz Chandler: I'm very well hydrated, but don't worry about cutting and conditioning. We can give you those hints and tips as you go along. Just think for now as we're sitting in January of dreaming of what growing your own flowers could look like and start to plan and play. Nothing happens until March. I know quite often on Instagram, I see people planting much earlier in February or January even.

[00:22:32] Roz Chandler: And I'm thinking, no certainly the climate in the UK is not made for that. We are not doing anything until March. The only times we are actually planting are in, we do hardy annuals in the autumn, which we overwinter under cover. But as we're now talking in January, we wouldn't be doing anything now until March.

[00:22:50] Roz Chandler: And if we're direct sowing into direct beds, we would definitely not be doing it until April. There is no rush. It isn't, don't worry about it. Pop over to the Facebook group that I told you about. There will be a guide there on growing your own wedding flowers. And there'll be lots of live sessions that we'll be running in January.

[00:23:11] Roz Chandler: There'll be some fireside chats as I call them as we go through the month where you can come and ask any questions you've got. But all I would say is give it a go. Wedding flower, doing wedding flowers is an absolute delight. And and it's very personal and saying that you grew them is amazing.

[00:23:29] Roz Chandler: So give it a go and come over, like I say, to the Facebook group. It's called, the group itself is called the Cut Flower Kickoff 2025, but we will be putting it in the show notes and we'd love to see you over there. Do take care.