Wedding decorations – the flowers

The flowers for my wedding were one thing I was always very clear on. While some people might be happy to pay a florist huge amounts to create bouquets, button holes and table settings, I decided this was one area I would be keen to cut costs.

I’m quite lucky in that I’m a creative person with good craft skills. I sourced all my flowers from Nursery Fresh an online wholesale supplier of cut flowers. To choose the right flowers I spent time looking up different varieties and colours on Google. Nursery Fresh were very easy to deal with and they sent me a spread sheet listing all the flowers in season on my wedding date.

 In the end I chose two colours of roses for my bouquets, and chose roses and freesias for the button holes. I had these delivered a day before my wedding and they came in buckets of water, well packaged and protected. I bought floristry supplies (wire and tape and pins) on ebay and tied all the bouquets myself, finishing them off with black and white striped ribbon. There are some good tutorials  (like this one) on youtube.

My bridesmaids and sisters in law helped with buttonholes. These were quite easy – a cream rose and an orange freesia tied with a black and white striped ribbon. They looked really stylish and were just as good, if not better, that the extremely expensive ones florists sell.

For my table settings I was bored by the limited range of vases most whole sale florists sell. In the end I bought red glass bottle-shaped vases for £5 each from Next. They had a small neck, so I could only fit in a few stems. I chose white tulips because they looked great with the vases, were very fresh and simple, and were also very cheap. Although they do splay out in the vases I quite liked this natural look rather than the very artificial displays some brides prefer.

Our ceremony was at the Bodleian Library. The space is so large and dramatic that I decided early on we would not be able to afford floral displays big enough to make a real impact. Instead I bought 4 standard ‘lollypop’ bay trees online from a garden nursery. These had ribbons and tissue-paper wrapped pots and looked very sweet framing the dias. We were able to give them away as presents at the reception and they are still alive and looking lovely months after the wedding.