THE FLOWERS

figuring out the flowers for our wedding has been an exciting process.  now, i may not have inherited my mother’s green thumb (at least not yet), but i do recognize and appreciate beautiful bouquets and buds and arrangements when i see them.  i can honestly say i had nearly as many floral magazine tear-outs as ones for the wedding dress!  and if the sky was the limit as far as the flower budget goes, you would see fresh flowers everywhere.  they would be on the church pew ends, they would be on an arch over the entrance to the reception, they would be the centerpiece for every table in the room, they would be fragrant and lush and in sight no matter where you look.  but, fresh flowers everywhere come at a steep cost, and as i have expressed previously, unless you have an unlimited budget, you will have to compromise at some point.  with all this being said, i am not at all discouraged about what my budget is for the flowers.  you just have to get creative with what you pick and where you use them and no one will be the wiser.  🙂

let’s take the centerpieces for starters.  big, blossoming centerpiece bouquets are often so beautiful and picturesque and certainly wedding day appropriate.  however, when you have a guest list of over 150, you’re going to need a lot of tables which of course means you’d then need a lot of centerpieces.  as much as i wish i could work fresh centerpieces into the budget, i also recognize that fresh centerpieces often cannot be repurposed, which means their beautiful lives are very short-lived.  you see how things start to come into perspective?  with this being known, it’s actually kind of a neat thing because then your centerpieces can be whatever you want them to be!  you could of course do silk flowers if you still want something floral, but just hop on pinterest and you’ll find thousands of floral centerpiece alternatives, many of them which you can do yourself.  i’m sure you’ve been to receptions where a picture of the newlyweds is in the center and surrounded by tealights galore or even where other common interests of the couple are used to depict one table from the other.  think maps of where the couple has vacationed together or pieces of music from their favorite composers.  really the options are endless!  i’m very excited for our handmade centerpieces and cannot wait for them to be revealed to our guests in april.

now, as far as flowers go elsewhere in the wedding (bouquets, corsages, boutonnieres), i decided real flowers were my heart’s desire, because where would the world be without real flowers!  many of the magazine pages i came across depicted the popular styles of today, which include lots of faded eucalyptus and soft pastel colors and even a few succulents here and there.  and although something like that would be perfect for our spring wedding, i wasn’t emotionally moved by them and didn’t feel they fit into our overall theme.  so, when my mother came in town for some wedding errands one weekend, we looked through all my ideas together and, thankfully, had the perfect luck in finding the combinations of greens and pinks and whites that would fit in just right for our big day.  the bridesmaids will hold some beautiful bouquets of greenery; the mothers’ and grandmothers’ wrist corsages will be simple and elegant; phillip, his best man, and the groomsmen have boutonnieres with ingredients inspired by my croatian heritage; and last but not least, my bouquet is going to be a fabulous combination of varying shades of pink with lots of different flower shapes and, in my mind, is going to be a spectacle in and of itself!  i can hardly contain my excitement!