Be master yourself on the occasion

LONDON: The day finally arrived for Bea's wedding. At the beginning of the year we set ourselves the task growing the flowers and much of the food in my garden at Perch Hill for the party of 120 people.

The garden was looking good – full to the brim with annuals. The dahlias were just beginning and there were plenty of potatoes, salad and herbs, so we were confident we could manage it.

For the flower decorations, Bea had chosen hanging globes – hung in several places through the garden. In the marquee, she had rosemary-covered table centres, full of nigella and sweet peas, and a simple hand-tied bunch to carry during the wedding service.

Garden decorations

Globes are a good choice. They beat any formal pedestal arrangement, with the flowers exploding in a firework display above your head, exuberant and abundant. They work in a room and a garden – if you keep them simple – and they work brilliantly in a marquee, hanging very visibly above everyone's heads, no matter how crowded the space.

We made two types of globe for the wedding, a pair of small spheres hanging in the sweet-pea tunnel, and one larger one in the little barn at the far end of the oast garden, where we hope people will sit. For the small globes, we used floral foam spheres (4in) studded with foliage (Euphorbia oblongata and dill), with no flowers. We didn't want the arrangement to compete with the swathes of sweet peas all around them.

For the larger, sock-it-to-you version, we used an 8in sphere with three types of foliage and three flowers, following a recipe I always use in large mixed arrangements. Ivy – collected in the wood – was the foliage base (what I call the primary foliage), then came euphorbia (as the filler), plus sweet rocket seed pods as the spiky, architectural, outer storey. We then added white larkspur as the dominant flower (the bride), backed up by the more delicate white Ammi majus (the bridesmaid), with the small-flowered, purple Allium sphaerocephalon as a colour contrast, or what I call the
gate-crasher. With this recipe and ingredients we couldn't go far wrong (see right for step-by-step instructions).

For the table

We have plenty of rosemary in the garden and so we decided to use it to cover drinking tumblers for the table centres in the marquee. Covering a tumbler or medium-sized jam jar (Bonne Maman French jam jars are ideal), is a good cheap technique to make a table centre arrangement more interesting. When you're sitting at the table, the vase is there, staring you in the face, almost exactly at eye level, so what you do with the container is almost as important as what you do with the flowers (see step-by-step instructions online). Then just fill the tumbler with the flower you have most of in the garden. We filled some with sweet peas – for the scent – but for most we used the lovely white Nigella papillosa 'African Bride'.

For the bride

Making a wedding bouquet is an honour and therefore slightly nerve-racking, but Bea wanted small and simple, with all the flowers from the garden, so it wasn't too daunting.

I picked Bupleurum rotundifolium as the foliage base, with bells of Ireland (Moluccella laevis) and honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum 'Serotina') for a filler and upper storey, to trail out at the top and sides of the bunch. Then I picked four flowers, the almost-black dahlia, 'Jowey Mirella' and dark scabious, 'Black Cat' and then a brighter pair of flowers, 'Con Amore' dahlia, crimson and magenta in one flower, and the lovely red nicotiana 'Deep Red' (see step-by-step instructions online).

On Thursday evening, I picked and conditioned the flowers by searing their stem ends in boiling water for 20 seconds and then put the bunch together on Friday and stored it with stems in deep water, dark and cool until Bea needed it on Saturday.

If you love flowers and making arrangements, you'll love them even more if they're home-grown. At a party or wedding, you'll then be wrapped in a distillation of the most perfect bits of your garden.