The Wildflower Wedding Challenge

Georgie Newbery from Common Farm Flowers approached us back in March for some Wildflower Turf she needed to grow on, for something a bit different! Georgie told us a little story of how Wildflower Turf was just what she needed! In fact Georgie said, ‘Our turf was BRILLIANT’!
The Wildflower Wedding Challenge
a story by Georgie Newbery…

It was early March when a bride-to-be called and asked if we’d be able to do flowers for her wedding on the 12th May.
Of course, said we, anticipating she’d ask for tulips, cow parsley, apple blossom perhaps – after all, these are all things we grow for cutting at Common Farm Flowers.
So she turned up with her intended and their gorgeous little girl and I’d made a Pinterest board to show them the sorts of flowers we’d have available at that time of year.  We are a flower farm, and we try to grow all the flowers we use in our floristry.  And she liked my suggestion of jam-jar posies filled with wild flowers, and little buckets with candles poking out from clouds of cow parsley – and then she said,
‘You’ll think I’m mad.’ I smiled, enigmatically and held my breath.  ‘But I’ve got this idea…’
And then she explained that what she really hankered after, and wasn’t sure if it would be possible, were table centres made up of runners of wild flowers.
‘What, like a strip of meadow?’ I asked, in my mind hiring a turf cutter for the afternoon a week before the wedding.  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, confident I’d not only understood what she wanted but could arrange it too – in six weeks.
Cutting strips of established meadow might have worked (though we’ll never know now).  But I thought that a) it would be grass heavy – what I thought my client wanted was a strip of wild flowers looking meadowy – and b) it would thump rather down the centre of her wedding tables if I cut it with a turf cutter.  There’s nothing very delicate about spring grass on the grow.  I needed to find her something prettier, something less grassy…
I went on-line to see what I could find.
And there were Wildflower Turf.  And ‘Yes Madam,’ they could deliver several square metres of wildflower turf just shooting (this was early March remember) and then we could cut it to shape and grow it on.  They and I chewed the fat over a metaphorical farm gate and decided that we ought to cut the turf tray-sized on its arrival so that it would grow out and fill them during the six weeks we had.  We agreed we’d have to hoik them in and out of the poly tunnel depending what kind of spring we had and keep a close eye on the watering – usually wildflower turf is ‘planted’ onto a scrape on the ground – ours was given a thin layer of sand in trays with drainage holes drilled into them.
But the result was a success.  After the wettest, coldest, most miserable April on record, and thanks to quite a lot of hoiking them in and out of the poly tunnel, my client’s meadow runners down her table centres were a great success.  Thank you Wildflower Turf for being so helpful when we needed you!

Something a bit different

Wildflower Turf as a table centre piece...

...Adds a splash of colour to the table!

works very well

Georgie commented, ‘even though we’ve had NO sunshine for months at least the campion was very prettily in flower.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we did more next year’.