Wedding flowers are an important part of delivering your chosen wedding style, but many couples don’t know where to start when it comes to choosing their wedding flowers.
Here are my tips for choosing your wedding flowers:
1. Wedding Flower Inspiration
Look for inspiration from a variety of sources – wedding blogs, social media channels, florist websites, bridal magazines – there is so much wedding floral inspiration out there.
Create an inspiration board – Pinterest is good for this, but if you prefer a physical board with cut outs so you can add ribbons and linens to bring your wedding to life the you can do this too – choose whichever option you prefer.
Consider flowers that are in season – this can be cheaper, easier for your florist to source, more sustainable and this is also the time when the flowers are at their best.
Consider fresh and/or artificial. Faux flowers have really developed over the years and can be a wonderful alternative to fresh flowers, this also enables you to keep your bouquet if you want to. If you don’t want to use all faux flowers, then using them with fresh flowers can be a cheaper way of creating your desired look. Equally if you want all fresh flowers then go for it, there is something in the scent of fresh flowers that you can’t replicate.
2. Choose your wedding style
Keep your wedding flowers within your wedding colour palette and your wedding style (e.g. romantic or elegant, delicate or impactful).
3. Choose your wedding venue and dress
Make sure you choose your venue and wedding dress before meeting florists as these decisions will be taken into consideration when choosing your wedding flowers. The venue is important as the size, style and set up times will affect which size and style of floral arrangements you should go for.
Your choice of venue will affect the design for your wedding, there may be arches, columns, nooks that you want to dress with flowers. If you want impact and you have the budget then add a decorative installation like this to wow guests.
Consider the size of your table centre arrangements. Again you will want it to fit with your venue but you will also want to ensure guests can still converse (over/under it) and to ensure you can still fit other items on the table that you want/need to have there (e.g candles, glasses, bread and butter etc).
With regards to the dress you need your flowers to compliment it (size and style wise). For example if you have a statement dress you want the bouquet to compliment it but you might not want to cover up the dress too much. Equally if you had a shorter tea dress style bridal gown you wouldn’t want a long, more formal bouquet.
You should also choose a size of bridal bouquet that you will be happy to hold for a long time and one that makes you happy (this sounds funny but flowers bring positivity and should add to your feeling of excitement when you see them on the morning of your wedding day).
4. Personalisation
Your wedding should be personal to you and your wedding bouquet is just one of the areas you can incorporate this.
This can be through the choice of flowers or how the bouquet is wrapped. For example I have had a bride who was from South Africa so she had the King Protea (the National flower of South Africa) in her bouquet.
If you want to incorporate personalisation in other ways then a florist could use material from a mother’s wedding dress or veil (or another memorable garment) to wrap around the stems of the bouquet or they could attach meaningful jewellery to the bouquet. This can be your something borrowed or as a way of having a loved one with you on your wedding day.
A common mistake:
5. Budget
This is an area where a lot of couples under budget. From experience I would say it is wise to budget c.10% of your wedding budget for flowers. Some couples manage to spend less than this, especially if flowers are not important to their wedding style but others may spend in excess of this, but this is a good starting point.
You can manage the budget carefully by working with trusted suppliers. Your florist or wedding planner can advise you on ways to be clever with your budget but still get the desired look. Choosing seasonal flowers, incorporating faux flowers, reusing arrangements in different places (such as moving ceremony flowers to the reception space) can all help to keep costs lower.
Your bonus Tip:
6. Don’t do your own flowers
Brides often think that they can do their own wedding flowers, either themselves or with the help of family/friends. They often think that it is going to be cheaper and this just isn’t the case. By the time you’ve sourced the flowers, the containers, created the arrangements you may have saved a marginal amount but it will not counter the exhaustion you or your family and friends will feel.
A florist is a professional, you pay for their quality of flowers, for their design experience, for their knowledge of the flowers and how to treat them, for their ability to keep the flowers looking fresh even after transporting and moving them, they will tidy away any mess created in the installation and they will take arrangements away after the wedding as well. So, you’re investing in a full service that is well worth it!
If you would like to know more about my services or discuss how I can help you then please contact me.