Just when we thought we knew and had dissected every minute detail about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding five years ago this past May, we learned of a special touch the couple included to pay tribute to Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, on their big day. Diana’s favorite flower was the forget-me-not, and, according to Kensington Palace (and per The Mirror), Meghan’s bouquet included the flower as a nod to the mother-in-law she will never know on this side of heaven.
“The spring blooms include forget-me-nots, which were Diana, Princess of Wales’s favorite flower,” a statement from KP read. “The couple specifically chose them to be included in Ms. Markle’s bouquet to honor the memory of the late Princess on this special day.”
The Mirror reports that “these flowers symbolize true love, making them perfect for a joyous wedding day.” Meghan’s bouquet also included sweet peas, lily of the valley, astilbe, jasmine, astrantia, and sprigs of myrtle (tradition for the bouquets of royal brides), all tied together with a raw silk ribbon. “Prince Harry even picked some of the flowers from their private garden at Kensington Palace,” The Mirror reports, specifically hand-selecting the forget-me-nots himself.
A year later, forget-me-nots made an appearance again when Harry and Meghan shared a photo of newborn son Prince Archie’s feet above a splay of forget-me-nots to mark Mother’s Day. Harry and Meghan shared the poignant tribute on their shared Instagram (which, of course, was later shut down).
Another flower-related touch that many who watched the royal wedding might have missed? It also involved Meghan’s bouquet—rather than tossing her bouquet, as is customary for brides to do, Meghan chose not to.
One tradition she did take part in: following the wedding, her bouquet was sent to Westminster Abbey and was then laid at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior. “The gravestone, normally surrounded by poppies, commemorates an unidentified British soldier who tragically died on the battlefield during the First World War,” The Mirror writes. “Not only does it commemorate a British man who lost his life, but it’s also a symbol for the many people who have died during the conflict.” The Queen Mother started the moving tradition a century ago when she married King George IV in 1923. In a move that surprised everyone at the time, she laid her bouquet on the grave to commemorate her beloved brother, Fergus, who was killed during the Battle of Loos in 1915, as well as the millions of others also killed during the war.
Other thoughtful touches in Meghan’s attire included having a piece of fabric from Diana’s 1981 wedding dress sewn into her Givenchy gown (which represented the traditional “something old”); her “something blue” was a piece of fabric from the dress she wore on her first date with Harry stitched into her veil. The veil itself was one of the most touching parts of the entire occasion—the 16-foot-long silk veil was embroidered with 55 flowers, representing the 53 countries of the Commonwealth; wintersweet, which grows in front of Nottingham Cottage on the grounds of KP, where Harry and Meghan lived at the time; and the California poppy, the state flower of (you guessed it), California, where Meghan is from. The veil actually took longer to create than her wedding dress itself, with embroiderers spending 500 hours on its completion, washing their hands every 30 minutes to ensure that the veil would remain immaculate until Meghan’s May 19, 2018, wedding day.
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