Flowers

I am a florist, so my flowers were very important to me. In keeping with a Green wedding I didn’t want any imported chemically laden flowers. I decided to use flowers and foliage from my mother and mother in-law’s gardens. I also picked many of the flowers out of obliging road side ditches. Well really my mother and aunt did most of the picking.

Bridal Bouquet: I picked the flowers for my bouquet and the flower shop I worked for put them together. My grandmother’s name was Fern so I made sure lots of ferns were in my bouquet. There were also purple clematis, floribunda white rose, a weed I've heard called pancake weed and a type of purple wild campanula. My florist friends did add green hydrangea that was probably imported, but I didn't ask and I knew they created the bouquet for me and that made it special.

Bridesmaids Bouquets: I made my bridesmaids bouquets and the groom’s bout the morning before the wedding. Each bridesmaids bouquet was a little different. My sister, the forester, had green maples seeds in hers, my friend I played in the forest with as a kid, had wild ginger, and my tattooed friend had zebra grass for her wild side.

Bouts: I have a very strong rule that if you don’t have a lapel you don’t get a boutonnière. So the only guy who got a flower was the groom. His was several white floribunda rose blossoms. I didn’t have flowers for our parents or anyone else.

Center Pieces: I did make all the center pieces for the reception. I used antique vases and bowls from my mother's china cabinet. Half the tables had a vase with a mixed flower bouquet and half had three glass vases each with one kind of foliage. I don’t recommend doing your own flowers. It took about three hours right before the rehearsal dinner started for me to get them all put together. Luckily there was a very nice janitor at the hall who helped me clean up or I would have been late.

The total cost of the flowers was $0