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Seasonal English Flowers for Summer Weddings
One of our delights at The Real Flower Company is to help you to find the perfect flowers for your wedding, confident that our sustainably grown blooms and floristry expertise will add joy and beauty to your special day. Unlike most wedding suppliers, most of the flowers and foliage we offer are grown on our own farms, nurtured with care from seed or bud and grown in a way that ensures they retain all their natural beauty and scent.
Finding the right flowers and choosing a florist for your wedding can involve a long journey at a time when there are so many other decisions to make. To help you, we have created a ‘ready-to-wear’ collection of bridal bouquets in a variety of colour palettes and styles for you to choose from, with complementary bridesmaids’ bouquets, buttonholes and table decorations. We can also create bespoke arrangements individually crafted by our team of florists to enhance your wedding venue.
If you are planning a summer wedding, now is the time to start thinking about flowers. So we asked our founder, Rosebie Morton, for her personal guide to the pick of English summer wedding flowers.
Roses
My mission in founding The Real Flower Company was to grow scented English garden roses as nature intended – the perfect centrepiece for an English summer wedding. Deep red roses create a striking and romantic contrast with blush pinks in our Wild Abandon Bridal Bouquet. Our Sugared Almond Bridal Bouquet brims with roses in soft pastel tones while the Romantic Antike roses in our Romantic Coral Bridal Bouquet are sure to turn heads.
Peonies
The English peony season runs from mid-May until early July and English peonies are a perfect statement flower for a classic wedding colour scheme. Two of the roses we grow year-round are often mistaken for peonies because of their shape and form: Peony Pink is a ballet-slipper pink rose and Cream Piaget is a soft off-white garden rose. These two beautiful peony alternatives are both nurtured on our gold-standard carbon-neutral sister farm in Kenya. Its position near the Equator creates the perfect natural climate to grow scented roses throughout the year, so if you love peonies and are getting married out of the English peony season you can still have peony-shaped blooms in your bouquet. As well as being fully carbon neutral, our Kenyan sister farm is also sustainable and operates to the highest possible social and welfare standards.
Stocks
Beautifully scented and with a palette that ranges from deep purple through lilac and dusky pink to cream, stocks add height and texture to any arrangement. We’ve used stocks to create elevation and form in our Romantic Coral and Sugared Almond Bridal Bouquets.
Sweet Peas
Delicate sweet peas add movement to a bouquet, giving it a ‘just-picked-from-the-garden’ feel. Pastel tones such as blush pink, lilac, peach and cream as well as deeper shades combine to create soft waves of colour across the arrangement. And of course, they smell absolutely gorgeous. We’re known for our scented English sweet peas and have been growing these wonderful flowers for decades. All our varieties are unique to us and are available from late March throughout the English summer. Our sweet peas are all highly scented, so if you choose sweet peas for your wedding then we hope their scent will transport you back to your special day year after year.
Achillea
Lacy achillea flowers always delight the eye and often stop us in our tracks as we walk past them in bloom here on our sustainable English flower farm. They have recently become increasingly popular and the range of colour – from reds and purples through peach and terracotta to pale pinks and cream – means they can be matched to any colour scheme.
Lavender
Statement flowers need a subtle backdrop and I love the way the muted purple flowers and silvery foliage of lavender complements most colour palettes – as well as providing a distinctive scent. We grow lavender on our sustainable Hampshire farm and also on our sister farm in Kenya which means we have a supply of eco lavender flowers and beautiful silver lavender foliage throughout the year.
Astrantia
These delicate star-shaped blooms in a range of pinks and creams add texture and interest to an arrangement. A favourite here on our Hampshire farm, astrantia has a long flowering season and provides texture and colour to arrangements. We’ve used deep purple-toned burgundy astrantia and purple clematis to highlight the exquisite roses in our David Austin Jewel Bridal Bouquet. The star-shaped flowers also work wonderfully in bridesmaids’ bouquets and we’ve used astrantia in our Antique Romance Bridesmaid’s Bouquet and Perfectly Pastel Bridesmaid’s Bouquet.
Nigella
With its clouds of feathery foliage and shy flowers, Love-in-a-Mist is a perfect choice for a summer wedding. The secret is in the name!
Thlaspi Green Bell
I love the ethereal, wispy texture this delicate foliage brings to a bouquet. Thlaspi Green Bell is hand-tied with textural foliage and wildflowers in shades of green and white in our Country Garden Cascade Bridal Bouquet to create a natural, modern and completely romantic arrangement.
Wild Oat Grass & Quaker Grass
We use grasses to introduce soft, tactile shapes and movement to our arrangements, and these are a couple of my favourites.
Larkspur
With its clusters of flowers in soft dreamy pinks, this adds height and interest to any arrangement.
Flowering Mint
The fluffy white flowers of summer mint work perfectly as a backdrop for statement blooms. We use herbs a lot to add texture as well as a subtle aroma to our arrangements.
Cosmos
Incredibly versatile and with a range of colours from deep reds and purples to pale pink and white, this is another delicate, feathery flower to add movement and a sense of the joy of summer. White Cosmos catch the eye in our Seasonal White and Ivory Bouquet and add joy and colour to our Seasonal Mixed Pink Bridal Bouquet.
Rubus
A member of the rose family and similar to a trailing blackberry but without the thorns, rubus adds both colour and movement.
Summer Flowering Jasmine
With its clusters of white flowers and glorious scent, this really adds a wildly romantic, unstructured feel to a bouquet.
Scented Geranium
Scented geraniums have a beautiful architectural leaf and a really pretty pink flower as well as an exquisite aroma. They are one of our signature stems here at The Real Flower Company for both their scent and form.
Clary Sage
With its rich and vibrant flower bracts, Clary Sage adds a pop of colour and scent that works well with any colour scheme.
Nepeta (Cat Mint)
With soft lilac flowers that blend with everything, nepeta, or cat mint, makes a great filler in a bouquet.
Honeysuckle
I love honeysuckle because of its beautifully shaped flowers and exquisite scent. It is equally effective whether still in bud or fully open.
Ammi Majus
Ammi Majus provides clouds of white frothy umbellifers that seem perfectly suited to a wedding and look good in any arrangement.
Scabiosa
This is one of the stars of summer. Both the perennial and the annual have beautifully rosette-shaped flowers in shades of purple, lilac, claret, pink and white. The wonderful rosettes of scabiosa in tones of pink complement pink dahlias and scented pink English roses in our Seasonal Mixed Pink Bridal Bouquet.
Daucus Carota
This classic umbellifer looks so beautiful from tight bud to the point when it is beginning to fade.
Want to find out more? You can browse our Wedding Flowers Collection here. The bouquets you see are available all year round so you can start planning for a summer wedding now. Or for bespoke wedding flowers or more advice, call us on 01730 818 300.