My Minty Centrepieces

Guest post by Amy Urquhart

I got married last month and I sure as sugar wasn’t going to incorporate the usual, boring, over-the-top, expensive floral centrepieces I saw in most wedding magazines into our reception!

Instead, I thought I’d buy scented geraniums. However, when I got to Richter’s to buy them the week of the wedding, the selection wasn’t that great, and those they had in stock were looking a little worse for wear.

The mint plants, on the other hand, looked great. There was a lot of variety, too. I needed 15 plants. I picked several different varieties, including Apple Mint, Candy Lime Mint, Variegated Peppermint, Scotch Spearmint (I ended up putting this one on the table where I’d seated most of the relatives from Scotland) and even Berries & Cream Mint.

I made new, pretty plant tags that co-ordinated with the rest of the stationery items I’d made for the wedding and had them laminated. I copied the Richter’s wording for them…it’s just that I really wanted the font and colour to match the rest of the decor.

I repotted the plants into new, 6″ plastic pots and placed each one into a galvanized steel holder (I picked these up at Dollarama). I had to put a smaller upside-down pot in the bottom of the container so the rim of of the plastic pot would line up with the rim of the steel container and inserted the newly-laminated, colour-co-ordinating plant tags.

This is the end result:

Centrepieces

We encouraged our guests to take the plants home and put them in their garden. It was great to find a way to incorporate my love of gardening (and knack for growing invasive plants) into our wedding reception decor. Each centrepiece cost about $7 to make.

Leave a comment

EcoForms

EcoForms (photo from EcoForms.com)

The world of gardening containers is a sad carnival of ugly. I grow A LOT of plants, therefore requiring A LOT of pots. Unfortunately, the few stylish containers out there fall outside of a price range affordable to the bountiful, yet thrifty grower. That’s why I was excited to find these gorgeous plant pots at a Whole Foods on a recent trip to San Francisco. EcoForms embody all of the positives of plastic plant containers but they are made of biodegradable materials such as rice hulls. While they won’t last forever — this is a GOOD thing — they will last five years and claim to be structurally sound and resistant to freezing and thawing conditions.

I bought three pots with accompanying saucer: a Nova 6 in mocha brown ($5.99 US), an ebony black urn ($3.99 US), and a bowl in avocado green ($3.99 US). Saucers ran just over a buck or so depending on size. It turns out I should have bought more since EcoForms only seem to be available on the West Coast for the time being.

Leave a comment