Flowers, flowers, flowers!
This is a transcript of a video from The Wedding Planning Hub
Flowers is an interesting one. Originally you would have flowers to hide your BO, that’s why you had flowers on a wedding day – I know, who knew?!
Anyway, luckily these days we have deodorant so we don’t need to have flowers to hide our body odour.
So now, traditionally flowers – it’s an interesting thing because there was a point where every table would have a massive centrepiece of flowers and that was just the way it was, whereas these days a lot of people opt for slightly different decor for the centrepiece.
You obviously can still have incredible flowers for your centrepieces and florists can make the most amazing centrepieces out of flowers. You could also create your own centrepieces using flowers or plants. I’ve also seen an incredible table display where they actually had this sort of moss / plant / very foliagy type display which was incredible.
The sky is completely the limit at the moment when it comes to floral decoration.
So let’s just run through the different things that you would need flowers for.
Traditionally what you would need is a bouquet for the bride. You would need bouquets for the bridesmaids and any flower girls. They could also have a basket with petals in so there are a few different options for that.
The Best Man will traditionally have a flower on his lapel (which way round I can’t think)usually that side so that would be this side. The Groom’s flower goes on the left, it’s usually slightly different to the rest of the groomsmen and the Best Man so the groom will have something a bit more elaborate in his to indicate that he’s the groom.
What a lot of people do at the same time is they also acknowledge members of the family that are important – but not the bridal party. So for example obviously the father of the bride would have one of those flowers. Give one to the father of the groom. You could also give one to any grandfathers and you could also give one to any brothers, siblings or any special people that are part of your wedding party – a godfather maybe something like that.
Then for the women, you would get something called a corsage which is again a flower that would either go on the wrist or you can have them made for their dresses.
It’s quite important I think when you do that to think about what they would be wearing and it’s quite nice to have the option of either pinning it or having a magnet. Having both as an option is better than just choosing one but quite often they’ll have a silk dress or something where a pin is not really ideal which is where the magnet works quite well if you’re going to be putting it on their dress.
Page boys, again they might have little mini boy cute flowers.
Then what you might want to think about is if you’re having a church wedding do you want to have some kind of standing floral arrangement in the church? Do you want things on the pews? It’s often worth checking with the churches because a lot of the time they actually do have quite neutral flower displays anyway, so it’s worth seeing what they actually have already.
In a registry office you probably wouldn’t think about taking flowers you obviously can but most of the time I don’t think you would.
If you were having a venue wedding then really what you want to look at is their setup and what they have existing and what you would like to add to that. People will go for decorative flower arches and this is where I say ‘to fake it or not to fake it’, because particularly with things like flower arches, if you do that with real flowers that can be super expensive.
I’ve also seen – okay I digress slightly – but obviously, with bouquets, there are so many different ways you can do it. You could have real flowers; you could have fake flowers; you could have broach bouquets; you could have an ornament bouquet. There are many different ways you could do bouquets these days. I’ve even seen a candy floss bouquet.
So again the sky’s the limit in terms of what you want to have but often if you’re spending a lot of money on an expensive floral bouquet it’s quite nice to have a spare bouquet that the florist can make up for you. It doesn’t have to be elaborate at all but if you wanted to do a bouquet toss you could then throw that.
Alternatively, you could ask one of the bridesmaids and take her bouquet if she’s not that interested in keeping it, and you could then throw that but a lot of the time bridesmaids do keep their bouquets.
There are also these amazing services that you can do these days where, as soon as your wedding is finished, you can send off the flowers and they will set them in resin. They’ll pick a couple of them out and set them in beautiful resin so you actually get a keepsake. Whereas before you would hang them and try to dry them and hope that they wouldn’t go mouldy and gross and now there are services. You have to obviously pre-book it before your wedding but there is a service where you are then able to speedily send your flowers off and they’ll do their best to save them and put them in resin for you so you can keep them on the ornament on the mantelpiece.
If you are having big table displays what I recommend is, so the flowers don’t go to waste, is choose someone on that table and then you just leave them a little note on their seat saying “thank you for your help with the wedding as a sort of gesture of our appreciation please take the table flowers away with you at the end of the night”, as a bouquet for them type thing – which actually leads me to the next thing…
Which is flowers are often used as thank yous during the speeches you may want to do thank-yous but I think that pretty much covers all the things you would need flowers for on a wedding day.
Again I think one of the most important things is if you are spending a fortune on flowers think about what you’re doing with those flowers at the end of the night.
- Do you want the venue to put them aside for you for the next day?
- Do you want them put in water?
- Are you going to give them to people to take home?
- Are you going to have them sent somewhere?
Some people have them sent to the local nursing home or something which I’ve seen which, if they are willing to receive that, then that can be a really nice gift and then they can obviously repurpose them, put them into vases etc.
There are many things you can do with them but I think that pretty much covers flowers on a wedding day.
Guest post from Sam
@The Wedding Planning Hub
