Potted Roses for Wedding Aisle
Since our engagement in September, I’ve been dreaming up wedding ideas. It might not surprise you that my saved “Wedding” collection on Instagram is mostly filled with incredible garden and landscape photos with just a few actual wedding pictures sprinkled in.
One day, when flipping through Bunny Williams’ book On Garden Style, I came across a gorgeous spread showing a row of potted roses lining a walkway. I immediately knew I wanted to create the same look on my wedding day. I have since embarked on the challenge of growing QTY: 10 potted roses to line either side of my wedding aisle. This effort is taking a bit of good-faith. Good faith that the roses will survive the winter, bloom at the right time and arrive unscathed to our venue. I think we will have to have a back-up plan just in case!
After a bit of research, I settled on David Austin’s Desdemona rose as the perfect flower for my pots. A blush pink that fades to white with time, the rose fit into my cream, pink and green color palette. It is a profuse, repeat bloomer, highly fragrant and (perhaps best-of-all) very disease-resistant. I ordered the roses bareroot directly from David Austin and planted them in late April (2021).
After soaking my roses overnight in our new guest bathroom tub, I got to work potting them. (When Alex saw the roses in the bathtub, he lectured me on how my hobbies might be getting out of hand haha!) I purchased 12 bags of Nature’s Care Organic Raised Bed Soil (I couldn’t find potting soil and thought this was close enough) and 1 bag of Organic Rose-tone. I mixed in a generous scoop of Rose-tone with the potting soil in each pot and tucked the soil around the roots of the rose.
I purchased these grey, plastic pots from Home Depot as a cheap, light-weight solution. At $10 ea. they were a great deal. It was important to me to have a light-weight pot because we will be transporting the roses quite a distance to our wedding venue. Hint: our venue is a 6+ hour car ride from Philly and requires a ferry to get to! Any ideas?
With consistent watering and a healthy feeding of MaxSea Plant Food (a Grace Rose Farm Instagram recommendation and my new favorite, although it is in limited supply and so hard to find), my roses are now flourishing! I even disbudded them to encourage root growth but we left town for two weeks and when I returned they were blooming like crazy!
Aren’t they gorgeous? And they smell incredible!
My next challenge is deciding on pots for the wedding ceremony. I am trying to balance color, weight, cost and style. I love the simplicity of the pot in the original Bunny Williams’ photograph. I found a nice, affordable option at Lowe’s but it’s concrete and each planter weighs upwards of 100 pounds! Logistically, not ideal. I will probably need to limit my search to fiber stone or a similarly light-weight material. Although I love the look of the antique, ornate French style urns, I don’t want to get too over-the-top. It’s been a further challenge because there is a very limited number of weddings that have used potted plants down the aisle so I don’t have a lot of reference photos for inspiration.
That being said, check out the one gorgeous photo I was able to find on Monique Lhuillier’s Instagram account! I’m obsessed with this photo!!!
Send me lots of prayers and well wishes on this endeavor, please!
