It’s been the rainiest winter I’ve ever known. This morning I walked the dog, in a woolly hat, a winter coat, and it lashed with rain. Again. The wind blew wild and we admired the brave surfers, still wearing their winter hoods and boots in the messy white water aftermath of Storm Kathleen.
We bumped into a few friends and their faithful hounds, and remarked, for the hundredth time this winter, about this diabolical Cornish weather and how we had never known a winter like it. Someone remarked on April Showers, and I thought to myself that April Showers are only really bearable when you haven’t had October, November, December, January, February and March Showers too.
It’s in years like this that I am so pleased that I leave the lion share of the flower growing to the professionals. My early April wedding this Saturday would have sent me into a tailspin if I had been responsible for perfectly timing the blooms for it. The only thing I managed to time to absolute perfection for this wedding were pots and pots of bridal crown narcissi…but if truth be told, I think that was more by fluke than by any green fingered prowess.
Meanwhile Georgina at River Garden Flowers and Phoebe at Good Grub Garden didn’t even break a sweat. Nailing this week’s colour palette with total aplomb, they gathered the most amazing selection of blooms for Abigail and Sean’s Spring wedding day, which had me feeling a little bit emotional when I went to collect them on Thursday. Such beauty, conjured from a winter of grey skies and rain seems somehow even more magical to me.
Abi loved the idea of anemones, and she particularly loved them in the kind of mauve/purple/lilac palette. When we first chatted I said that we never promise a particular flower, especially in the Springtime but instead we promise that our wedding flowers will be beautiful, and that they will be locally grown, and will not be flown for gazillions of miles around the globe. Abi was brilliantly chilled out, placing her trust in me, and the wonderful growers who I work with, and left us to it, never mentioning anemones again.
Over email, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that we were always beholden to the weather gods and that sometimes nature just doesn’t want to play ball. Her dad had grown tulips that were doing their thing a little bit too early, and so she knew exactly what I was talking about. And then, to my surprise, despite all the dreary days, the lashing rain and the lack of sunshine, the anemones were ready…just in time…with crazily large blooms, the longest of stems, and their quality was just off-the-scale-amazing. These beautiful but fleeting flowers, would, after all, be the star of Saturday’s floral show.
If you are planning an early April wedding for 2025, and are looking for inspiration for your flowers then here, dotted through this post, are some lovely photos of the kinds of bouquets and arrangements that we have made for April couples. And as an April bride myself (Mike and I married on an Easter weekend 21 years ago), I can’t help but go a bit gooey eyed over the tulips, the narcissi, the ranunculus…and yes, the anemones too. What a wonderful, but slightly nerve shattering time in the floral calendar.
Here’s to Spring…with all its showers, its storms, and for this week’s couple, little bursts of sunshine, breaking through the clouds, just as they exchanged their wedding vows.
