Planning Our Gardens for Custom-Grown Weddings

Custom-grown wedding flowers are the very heart of what we do. It’s a tremendous privilege to be trusted with growing and designing for such a special day, and it’s not a role we take lightly. Planning the garden is a labor of love, and we recently finalized our plans for the 2025 season.

A snapshot of our early spring garden plans in all of its color-coded glory ~ captured by Ashley Meier Photography.

The process can be tedious because we’re attempting to organize multiple seasons of flowers and dozens of weddings (each with their own very specific palette and style) across three different gardens. Adding to the complexity is that many of the flowers are “cut and come again” meaning that they’ll re-bloom for months at a time; other varieties are single-stem and, once they’re cut, we have to plan for immediately getting their spot in the garden filled with the next season’s flower. It’s tricky to reduce all of these plans to a piece of paper - or, more accurately, an online spreadsheet. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I began really thinking about the garden plans in regards to floral “microseasons,” or the distinct windows where various flowers tend to bloom each season.

Here in Greater Philadelphia (Zone 7a), we have five floral microseasons: Early Spring, Late Spring, High Summer, Late Summer, and Early Fall*. Each of these five microseasons has its own temperament in the garden, as determined by the blooms that are at their very peak. Because the ever-changing garden doesn’t align too well with the traditional season structure (early spring and late spring flowers are incredibly different, for example), it’s most helpful for us to think in terms of these microseasons when capturing the essence of our clients’ visions. Each floral microseason, then, gets its own garden plan (aka its own spreadsheet) and we organize our weddings for the year in this way.

Within each floral microseason, we have our weddings color-coded with descriptors for their overall floral style and color palette. The weddings are in rainbow order with our earliest custom-grown wedding (this year, it’s a mid-April one) in a rich red shade and our latest one (November 1st) in a deep purple. I’m not entirely convinced my color coding is the most effective method for visually organizing data, but I haven’t yet figured out a better way - and at least it’s pretty! The sections of the garden are then shaded in these different colors to show the wedding(s) for which each planted variety is intended.

Each microseason’s plans show the various varieties we’re growing, too; I list the names and colors of the eleven varieties of sweet pea seeds we ordered, for example, so that I have an at-a-glance guide when I am dreaming about the details for our June weddings. The plans are also riddled with field notes that I don’t want to forget - things like “horizontal trellis here,” “vertical trellis there,” “start a new succession of blush zinnias as soon as the larkspur finishes up” and “add this late succession of ammi” for the fall bride who loves its texture.

The process is time-consuming and requires both careful consideration and flexibility - we’ll almost certainly add a few varieties because I couldn’t resist a specific shade during a special seed sale, and I’ll invariably employ a few back-up plans - but it’s well worth it to move into the busy season ahead with intentionality and organization.

*Regarding the floral microseason timing: Early Spring is approximately early-mid April until mid-May, Late Spring runs from mid-May through mid-late June, High Summer lasts from late June through early August, Late Summer is from mid-August through mid-September, and Early Fall is from mid-September until our first frost, which is usually in late October.

“Floral microseasons” are not any sort of officially recognized term; I made them up while laying in bed around 3am, but I stand by them :)