Everything’s Coming Up Roses

Jordan and Matt from King’s Cliffe enjoyed a fabulous summer wedding at Irnham Hall, with plenty of beautiful blooms courtesy of the groom...

Wedding Photographer: Rebekah Robert Photography, 07736 931496, www.rebekahrobert.com.

IT’S GOOD to have a plan, but sometimes you’ve just got to concede that life has different ideas. By extension, it’s good to just accept that life also knows what it’s doing and that soon, everything will be coming up roses.

And talking of roses... meet Matt Sharpe, this month’s groom. The couple live in the village of King’s Cliffe, and Matt works in the flower industry in Cambridgeshire, as one of his company’s senior buyers, with a particular professional interest – and a fondness for – roses.

Chances are, if you’re purchased a beautiful bouquet of roses from one of the country’s biggest retailers – supermarkets or one of the smarter multinational retailers – it’ll be Matt who has purchased them for his company, and worked alongside his floral designers and product developers to present them beautifully for Valentine’s Day.

As you’d expect then, there were plenty of flowers – some very beautiful ones too –when Jordan and Matt married in June last year at Irnham Hall, the country home of the Benton Jones family, dating back as far as 1380 and virtually unchanged since the 16th century.

Both Matt and Jordan are local and met on Jordan’s 19th birthday after both happened to be out on the town that evening. Feeling peckish on the way home, each stopped at a local takeaway to enjoy a bite to eat, and bumped into each other. Matt asked for Jordan’s number, then messaged her the following morning and the rest is history. That was back in 2014, and a proposal followed a couple of years later with Matt popping the question under a starry sky, accompanied by flickering candles.

“We had a longer engagement than anticipated, partly because we fell pregnant