your guide to winter florals with The Garden Gate Company | uk wedding blog

A beautiful blog post today, gorgeous florals and wonderful words from The Garden Gate Flower Company. Such passion and creativity from these ladies. You should see what they have produced for a clients house this year for Christmas. Green with envy. I hope you enjoy this post, it is a different take on the usual seasonal guides and something yummy to look at in your lunch break. All words and images belong to The Garden Gate Company. 

Winter

Winter is a pause.  It hesitates.  To breathe sharp, clean air refreshes like peppermint.   Winter seeps in with determined stealth, still a small surprise to the senses, an intake of shrill cold to push all memories of inert cosiness aside.   The heady, noisy winds of autumn’s chaos have cleared the way.  As foliage recedes we are left with the skeletal, sculptural spaces left behind.  There is light falling grey and clear through naked branches, and slanted shadows echo their shapes on the ground.  To sit under a tree shifts attention to texture and weave.  The smooth grey of mottled bark, skin-tight young beech, or rough fissured, ancient wood of oak, holds firm, it is solidity.  Twigs, trees, seed heads endure summer’s heat and damp, its decorative greenery, flowers, bustle.   Now, in winter, it speaks to the quiet.    Lichen falls from boughs like luminescent feathers and moss clothes their naked branches, small stars of jewel green or tightly knitted blankets, among roots where ferns coil their wings back into the earth and wait for spring.

Here we have used cut glass to throw shadows in candle light creating icy patterns on the table. We have collected acorns and pine cones, and branches from silver birch with their characteristic twiggy explosions frame small posies of paper white narcissi and jam jars tied with twine, and set with candles on a bed of moss.  We have used rounds of wood and glass which balances its solid, muted presence with a light airiness.  We have plucked the last of the roses from the icy clutch of winter and made them into corsages, their soft pink petals sing next to lichen’s verdigris.   The outlined shapes of ferns and seed heads keep the table top simple but interesting; allowing each stem its own space to be seen is the idea with a few single stems in each bottle or vase.   Using white narcissi and hydrangea flowers with candlelight gives them a ghostly beauty.  Lots and lots of small lights creates an atmosphere as night falls.  Rosemary sprigs to be doused with gin and ice are a continuation of the theme.

We made twiggy willow wreaths with different lichens, mosses and succulents, and willow wands twisted with silver grey foliage like frost on scented narcissi.  Flower crowns for flower girls and small bouquets for bridesmaids in green and white with pine, seed heads of clematis, and the last brave ferns, anemones, paper whites and hydrangeas with scented mahonia spires.  Tied with simple twine or vintage lace, with its patterns like ice etched on windows, is perfectly wintry.

Winter is an essence.  It reveals the bones of the world, its honesty and lack of excess are invigorating to body and soul.   A winter wedding captures all of this purity; it concentrates the palate of colours and affects a simplicity of design which speaks of our seasons, and our landscapes, our place.  Getting married in winter is about making your own traditions, about the feelings you have sinking-in as you catch the scent of wood smoke on a cold evening walk, or the memories you create climbing the biggest tree in the woods with your kids, the warmth that comes from sharing this stuff, these things, side by side.