Wedding Florals

I’ve mentioned in another piece that I work for a tea shop and tea room which also is a florist. As I plan my wedding for this May, I feel incredibly grateful to have seen floral designers busy making arrangements and to have learned some tips from them when dealing with flowers. Here are a few considerations I’ve thought about that might be helpful for you, too!

1. Some flowers are beautiful, but break the budget.

One of my absolute favorite flowers is the peony. The layering of the petals into big flowers is just beautiful to me.

And yet, one of the most expensive flowers the shop has ever worked with has been the peony. While these flowers are absolutely gorgeous, they often come at a fairly high cost and…

2. Some flowers are finicky.

Peonies can be a bit like lilies where there is not always a guarantee that the buds will open up into proper blooms. We got an order of peonies in at the shop once, and several of them refused to unfurl.

Anemones and ranunculuses can also give a florist a bit of a run-around. They sometimes tend to droop a bit more quickly than would be preferred.

At the shop, ranunculuses have only been purchased a couple of times. The flower-heads get a little top-heavy even when kept in floral coolers.

Floral coolers keep flowers at a temperature designed for longevity. Also, according to Andrew Joseph’s article “Flower Refrigeration 101” published with the Florists’ Review, humidity is also controlled so that the cooler “slows cut flower dehydration, resulting in longer-lasting flowers.”

The cooler at the shop once helped us keep an arrangement used for display in the tea room for nearly a month (if not longer!) with only minor changes being made—replacing a older flower here and there. However, wedding florals operate in different ways compared to other arrangements and likely won’t have the opportunity to stay in the optimal flower temperature and humidity once at the venue.

The tea room arrangement that lasted so long was only on display out of the cooler for a few hours a day, and it also had ready access to plant food and moisture through floral foam. The foam is prepped with nutrients and water by the florist, and then the stems of the flowers and greenery are pushed into their places to look all lovely.

Some of your arrangements might be able to use the floral foam, especially if the vessels they’ll be in are opaque.

Others, like bouquets, will be kept cool and probably in vases with water for as long as possible, but will ultimately be out of water for a good deal of time and likely in warmer temperatures.

My fiancé and I are getting married indoors in May. Thankfully, our venue has air-conditioning (it is an older chapel; this was not always the case and we are extremely happy about this recent development!). Summer weddings with lots of heat can impact the florals. Of course, heat can deteriorate and discolor the petals of flowers, but I’ve also heard about a different effect: seeded eucalyptus becoming popping eucalyptus!

Apparently, when seeded eucalyptus gets too hot and is in too much humidity, the seeds pop open! My fiancé wants to make seeded, popping eucalyptus into celebratory greenery like confetti—I don’t think we can get the seeds all on the same page though, haha!

3. Silk florals can become your best friends.

Prices. Finicky florals. Availability. This last aspect of flowers can be a bit stressful. But if your favorite flowers are not in season, you might try adding a few silk flowers to your arrangements.

A wedding arrangement at the shop used silk magnolias and was absolutely stunning! Plus, they don’t need certain temperatures and humidities to stay pretty and bright!

Conclusion

For myself, I’m thinking of using lots of roses. They might not be my favorite flower, but they are incredibly affordable and have so many different variations. Little spray roses all tiny and multi-budded on a stem. Garden roses with layers and ruffles. They’re lovely! And they are pretty easy to have supplied. I’ll definitely have some other flowers as well, of course. Stock, maybe spider chrysanthemums, baby’s breath, lots of kinds of eucalyptus.

These decisions are still a work-in-progress (which I need to make progress a little faster, haha). However, I hope these little notes might be helpful to you! Whatever you choose, I know your wedding florals will be beautiful!