What Actually Grows Here: A Year of Westchester Wedding Flowers

I want to start with something most florists won’t say out loud. Most of the wedding flowers Westchester couples fall in love with online were grown in Colombia, or Ecuador, or a greenhouse in Holland, and got to New York in a cardboard box with a week’s head start on wilting. I buy them too. But there are farms within an hour of here, up the Hudson, over the Connecticut line, a couple right in the county, and for a good stretch of the year the stem that was cut Thursday morning on a back road in Pound Ridge is simply a better flower than the one that flew in. Not always. Not in February. But more often than the industry would like you to know. So here’s roughly what’s growing near you, and when it’s worth asking for.

April, May

It starts slow. Daffodils, which nobody wants at a wedding until they see a hundred of them in one vase. Then local tulips, and I mean local, not the ones from Holland, and these are bigger and floppier and they keep growing in the vase for days after they’re cut, bending toward whatever window is nearest. Some couples love that. Some want them to hold still. I ask.

By the end of April the farms with high tunnels have ranunculus and anemones, and they’re noticeably better than what I get from California because they haven’t spent six days in a truck. And in May, for about two weeks, lilac. I can’t describe the smell and I’ve stopped trying. What I can tell you is that lilac drops dead in an hour unless the stem is split and soaked overnight, so it’s a flower for people who hire someone who knows that.

The thing I actually get excited about in spring is branches. Quince, cherry, forsythia, crabapple, dogwood, and a bundle of them costs less than a bunch of decent roses. Two buckets of flowering branches will fill a ceremony arch by themselves. A lot of the spring weddings I do around Bedford are mostly branches with a few flowers tucked in for the close-ups, and nobody has ever noticed the ratio.

Peonies, sometimes, the last week of May, if it’s been warm. I don’t promise it. I’ve been burned.

June

This is the month. If a couple asks when they should get married so everything can come from nearby, I say the second or third week of June and I don’t hesitate. Peonies for about three weeks. Sweet peas, which smell like the whole season and last maybe four days, so they go in the bouquet and stay away from the tables. Foxglove, campanula, snapdragons, stock, iris that’s perfect for one day and gone the next. Garden roses from the two or three growers around here who bother with them, though most garden roses are still imported even in June, and the local ones sell out by Wednesday.

The greenery is the other reason. Everything’s new. Nothing’s tired, nothing’s been chewed on, and it hasn’t been hot yet. I can build a whole wedding, arch to boutonnieres, from things grown in Westchester and Putnam in June, and you can see the difference in the photos where the camera gets close.

July, August

Then it gets hot, and the local list changes rather than ends. Zinnias in every color there is. Cosmos, scabiosa, snapdragons still going. Lisianthus, which looks like a rose, lasts longer than one, and costs less, and which I use constantly without ever having found a way to make it sound exciting. Celosia, ammi, gomphrena. Hydrangea, which by now is coming out of every yard in the county whether the county likes it or not, the round blue kind in July and the cone-shaped kind in August that goes from white to pink as the weeks pass. Herbs for the napkins, basil and mint and rosemary, because they smell good and cost nothing.

The practical part is that in August anything delicate is finished by cocktail hour, so sturdier local stems are what I’d choose even if the delicate ones were free. A tent wedding in Katonah in August wants zinnias and lisianthus and hydrangea that was cut yesterday, not an imported garden rose that’s going to be wide open and dropping petals before anyone sits down.

September, October

Best two months of the year, and it isn’t close, and the reason is dahlias. Dinner-plate dahlias as big as your face. Ball dahlias. The café au lait one everybody shows me on their phone. Colors you cannot get from a wholesaler, because dahlias bruise if you look at them wrong and don’t ship well, which means a dahlia that came through the market and a dahlia from a farm past Katonah are two different flowers with the same name. This is the one flower where I’ll tell a couple no to the import.

Around them, October brings the heirloom chrysanthemums, big and shaggy and nothing like the grocery mums, plus amaranth, sedum, grasses, rosehips, hydrangea gone papery and antique, and the trees themselves turning. Oak, maple, viburnum with the berries on. I’ve done September weddings on the river in Croton and October ones up at estates in North Salem where the whole palette came from within twenty miles, and the couple didn’t quite believe me when I told them.

And then it frosts. Mid-October up north, a couple of weeks later down by the Sound, and it all ends in one night. If you’re getting married in the second half of October, ask your florist what the plan is for the morning after a frost, because there needs to be one.

November to March

Local, in winter, means greens and branches and whatever got dried in the fall. Cedar, pine, magnolia, boxwood, winterberry. Strawflower and grasses and hydrangea from October, hung upside down in the back of the shop. And starting in late February, forced branches, quince and cherry brought inside to bloom early, which is the first hint of spring and looks a little like a miracle in a ballroom in Rye in March.

The flowers themselves are imported and I’d rather just say so. Ranunculus and anemones from California, roses from South America, tulips from Holland in January, amaryllis from wherever amaryllis is coming from that week. A winter wedding built on greenery and candles with a few imported stems where they count is a lovely wedding. It isn’t a local one. Anyone who tells you their January peonies came from a farm in the Hudson Valley is telling you a story.

So when does local actually win

Dahlias, always. Anything you’re buying for the smell, sweet peas and lilac and stock and real garden roses, because scent doesn’t survive a cargo hold. And anything fragile that wants a short trip.

The market wins on volume, three hundred stems of one rose in one color for a ballroom in White Plains. It wins in February. And it wins when the palette is strict, because a farm can’t promise what color the field will be in a given week.

Most of what I do is a mix, and I think that’s the right answer. Local in the bouquet, on the sweetheart table, in the escort cards, anywhere guests get close. Imported in the arch and the big pieces, where it’s about scale and nobody’s leaning in. The close-up flower should be the one that was in the ground on Thursday. It just looks different. Less like it came out of a box, more like it’s a little surprised to be indoors.