Things To Think About When Planning Your Wedding

Knowing exactly what to focus on when starting your planning journey is key for coordinating a stress free wedding. If you’re unsure what you need to focus on, and you’re lacking inspiration then hopefully this guide will help you get started and understand what you need to plan for your big day.

Set Yourself A Budget

The most important thing to start with is setting your wedding budget. If you don’t know how much you can afford, then you’re going to struggle when it comes to booking suppliers, and working out how much everything’s going to cost. Make sure you know who’s contributing what as soon as possible, as this will give you the full picture of what you can and can’t afford.

The last thing you want is to book is a cheaper venue, because your parents can’t afford the mansion you wanted and so on. Allocate a budget that you’re happy to to pay for each part of the wedding, so you know where the money is being spent and how it is being split across the whole wedding.

Try And Decide On A Theme

It’s good to know what theme you want for the wedding early on, because it makes decision making far easier. You can decide on the key colours for the wedding, the floral design, catering and what sort of entertainment or DJ to hire a DJ with partysounds. Once you know the theme, all these decisions become much easier to make.

Finding Your Perfect Venue

Once you’ve settled on your budget and theme, you can actively start finding the perfect venue for the wedding and reception. It’s a very personal choice, but you will need to consider a few things before you settle on “the one”. How many guests who you ideally want to have? Will you want to have the ceremony and reception in the same location? Do you want on site accommodation? Do you want exclusive use for a weekend or just one day? These are just some of the things you’ll need to consider.

If you’re just beginning to plan your big day, and are unsure where to begin or what to focus on, then hopefully, these few tips will give you a good starting place.

Happy planning!

Four Elements Of Your Wedding That Should Perfectly Match Your Flower Choice.

I  think you’ll agree, the flowers that you choose for your wedding are always going to be a key part of your special day. The flowers that you select can completely enhance the aesthetic of your wedding and ensure that it looks absolutely incredible. To maximise the effect here, you need to ensure that everything matches and fits together. Here are some of the key elements of your wedding that you should bear in mind.

Venue

The flowers that you choose will often be influenced by your wedding venue. Certain flowers will complement a more traditional venue, and vice versa with a more contemporary one. If you’re getting married in a church, then you may want to consider more traditional flower choices in lighter  shades. Romantic statement arrangements around the altar, and lining the aisle will ensure the church looks absolutely beautiful. Alternatively, if you’re getting married in a contemporary space, consider having more structured arrangements in bolder block colours.

Dresses

Flowers are the ultimate accessory for you and your bridesmaids. The gowns you choose will of course determine the style of bouquets, but the flowers should always complement rather than dominate. Choose floral elements that tie everything together. Remember you don’t want your bridesmaids looking as though they’re going to someone else’s wedding! 

The bridal flowers set the tone for the day, and will give your guests that first taste of what’s to come in all the different areas of your wedding venue.

Table Decor

Your wedding reception is where you’ll be spending the majority of the day, so you want it to look incredible. As I said before, your venue will determine the design you decide on, so go with it. Small floral arrangements on the tables will get lost in a high ceilinged room, so don’t be afraid to think big! Scent is also a key point to consider, because fragrant flowers are always a winner. Gentle fragrance from roses and sweet peas delight the senses, but beware overpowering scents like lilies which can dominate your guests dining experience.

Music

Believe it or not, the floral arrangements of your wedding can enhance your musical entertainment! You’ll be spending a lot of time, effort and money making sure the venue looks amazing, but what abut the stage?

If you’re lucky enough to have an outdoor setting, why not decorate the stage with flowers for your live wedding band to ensure that they have a beautiful place to perform?

I hope this helps you understand some of the key things that you should consider when selecting the perfect flowers for your wedding. If you make the right choices here, then it will bring the entire wedding together, ensuring a perfect celebration.

Advice For Dressing Your Wedding Venue.

You’ve chosen and booked the perfect location for your wedding. A very important part of your work is now done, so take a breath. Now comes the fun part! How will you be dressing your wedding venue? What are the little touches or extravagant expressions that will enhance this location that you’ve picked from a cast of thousands, and turn it from being someone else’s venue into your venue?

Begin With Your Theme

You may already have a theme or colour scheme in mind, driven by the flowers of the wedding party perhaps. This can provide inspiration for dressing your wedding venue, influencing arrangements, table linen, chair decorations and much more. Reflecting the colours and motifs of the season is another way to get inspiration for dressing your wedding venue. In Spring you might use soft pastels, with details like quirky birds nests or eggs. In Winter, perhaps a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in the venue with glittering baubles as place name holders, or to display menus.

Think Like A Guest

Of course, the most important people at the wedding are you and your partner! But thinking about your guests’ experience throughout the day is a wonderful way to make sure that you create a vision for them as well as the whole space; so don’t just focus on obvious elements like table decorations.

A good place to start is to ask yourself, what will your guests see as they enter, and how will everything flow? How will your guests find out which table they’re seated at, or where the the buffet is served from if you are offering something less formal? A stunning statement arrangement or a cluster of old family photos in an unexpected location can define certain areas, as well as surprising and delighting your guests.

Rise To Great Heights

On this theme, think about the scale of your wedding venue. You needn’t limit yourself to placing your decorations at table height. If there are pictures hanging, can they be festooned with garlands? How about hanging installations from the ceiling bedecked with flowers?

By the same token, remember that if you provide places to sit then perhaps you can dress the floor. Rugs, scatter cushions and throws combined with eye-catching table ornaments all ensure beauty at the lower levels, and contribute to a truly glamorous theme.

Light The Way

Lighting really can create a beautiful mood. So don’t just think about the main lights but also how accent lighting could enhance floral arrangements and food tables. Don’t forget how you’ll transition from day to night. Candles, fairy lights and tea lights, as well as carefully positioned spotlights, can create dramatic effects.

Create Joy

Flowers create joy: the scent, the sight and the feel of them. Don’t limit flowers to bouquets and buttonholes, instead work with your florist to explore the possibilities your wedding venue has to offer. You might be surprised!

Talk It through

Many of the suppliers who will help bring your wedding vision to life have been doing so for years, so take their advice! They’ll be able to work with you, bouncing ideas around and making suggestions for little touches or dramatic statements that you had perhaps never thought of. So do take advantage of their expertise, but above all enjoy bringing your vision to life.

Things I've Learnt Being A Florist.

If there’s one thing that the last year has taught me, it’s that life is precious and fleeting. The things we used to take for granted, and which seemed reassuringly permanent have proved to be anything but. So I’ve decided to stop worrying about the things I can’t control, accept what I can, and be grateful for what I have.

Over the last 6 months, life for me and my husband has been both worrying and upsetting, culminating in the death a family member, and a longstanding friend. For all of us, it’s been a traumatic year that has changed our lives dramatically; making us question whether the things we thought were important actually were.

I do flowers. It’s what I’ve done for 32 years, and what I hope to do until I retire, because I love what I do. For anyone who doesn’t work in the world of flowers, it’s hard for them to understand that I work in an industry based entirely on emotion. It’s a strange concept to grasp, but in the simplest terms, flowers make people happy.

Of course florists have known for years that flowers are life enhancing, we’ve already got that sussed! Their symbolic language has been recognised for centuries, where almost every sentiment imaginable can be expressed with flowers. So at a time when many of us are reevaluating how we live our lives, and how what we do impacts on others; I’m dismayed that the world I love so much is now in the firing line for not being WOKE enough!

Before I go any further, I should make one thing clear; like Miriam Margoyles on the Graham Norton show - I don’t do political correctness, and I certainly don’t do WOKE. I’m far too old and comfortable in my own skin to tiptoe around anyone else’s sensibilities; because as a gay, white florist, no-one’s EVER bothered to tiptoe around mine! From being the school poof in rural Cornwall, to experiencing black homophobia in London, I’ve heard it all - but I’m still here.

The irony of the entire business of flowers being called out for not being “diverse” enough hasn’t escaped me. We aren’t talking scaffolding or heavy industry, we’re talking flowers and an industry based on nature, which brings joy to millions. How many sectors can actually claim that?

If you are going to “call out” the industry as a whole, then study the industry as a whole before making sweeping statements. Ask the people in it why they’re in it, how they got into it, how it works and how it’s changed.

This is how it works, and this is how it’s changed. The wholesale supply of flowers is dominated by men, the business of floristry is dominated by women. Complaints that there are too many men in the flower markets don’t take into consideration the physicality of the job, or the anti social hours. Would you rather spend your working life flowering weddings and events, or lifting and shifting from 2am to 10am in an artificially chilled wholesale market?

The business of flowers that I came into in 1989 bears absolutely no resemblance to what exists today. Instagram and Pinterest hadn’t made floristry a fashionable or enviable career choice. Floristry was something that either 16 year old girls did before they got married, because they were too common to do anything else; or bored housewives went back to after their children had grown up. 

My first boss in Plymouth was a hard task master, but a brilliant business woman, which is why she drove around in a Rolls Royce. A world away from the type of shops I later worked in in London, she never tried to push the boundaries, and only sold what what she knew would sell. 

I once made the mistake of asking why we couldn’t have some more unusual flowers in the shop. Her reply was swift and withering. “Plymothians are too thick to appreciate anything else”.

I made my escape and moved to London in 1994, thinking the streets would be strewn with rose petals…..they weren’t. My provincial training hadn’t prepared me for a work life filled with chaos in a Notting Hill flower shop. The owner loved referring to all the staff as “waifs and strays”; and the manageress regularly screamed at us, “you’re all a bunch of fucking wankers”, but not when Damon Albarn came in and dropped £50 notes all over the floor.

Image by Naomi Kenton

Fast forward 25 years, and If you work in retail floristry the business is still largely staffed by women, because the pay is crap. If you’re a man and you have a family and a mortgage, you aren’t going to work in a flower shop, unless you own it. I spent 15 years in retail floristry, and all the male florists I worked with were gay. If they’d had family responsibilities, they couldn’t have survived.

Social media has changed floristry completely, for better and worse. It has inspired us to become creative in ways we could never have imagined. We’ve made new connections and friendships, we’ve pushed the boundaries of design more than ever before; and the concept that you only buy flowers for births, marriages or deaths is a distant memory. The down side is that it’s made floristry a fashionable career, and fashionable careers often rely on smoke and mirrors; or as I like to call it FLORAL WANK. 

It’s a term I came up with years ago, after a very high profile florist exclaimed on their website  that they “sometimes work themselves into a creational vortex”. A bit Dr Who I know, but many others have followed in those wanky footsteps, but as Alex Polizzi would say “it’s all bollocks darling”.

My entry into floristry was very old school. I went to college and got a formal qualification. It served me well, and kick started the career I had in London, but hardly anyone I’ve ever worked with did the same. In London it seemed to be more of a hindrance than a help. 

In the 90’s, the rise of glamorous and enticing flower schools in the Capital spawned an industry in itself, which continues to flourish today. Many of their students have gone on to have very successful careers, but many fell by the wayside with the realisation that they were never going to earn as much in a flower shop as they did in an investment bank.

Those with any nouse knew that for a lot of the time, floristry is a bloody hard slog.

Floristry courses don’t tell you that there’ll days when you wonder why the hell you chose to be a florist. They don’t prepare you for getting up at 4am to do office contracts on Monday mornings, when it’s pissing with rain, and you’re having to empty vases full of stinking water that have been festering in overheated offices for a week. They don’t tell you that there’ll be days when you’re trying to load your van at market, and there’s a queue for the lifts because 2 out of 3 are out of order, and none of the ticket machines in the car park are working. They don’t prepare you for the day when the parchment coloured roses that you’ve promised faithfully for that fashion shoot don’t turn up, and all your wholesaler says is, “sorry love, I couldn’t get them”.

Talking of the market, I couldn’t care less about how rude/vulgar/sexist/whatever the language is. Like a certain Chinese restaurant in Soho which is famed for the rudeness of its staff, and thrives because of it; market banter is part of the fabric of this rich floral tapestry. I roared when a 70 something nun didn’t flinch when asked if the intensity of her orgasms decreased with age. Quick as a flash she came back with, “Well  I wouldn’t know about that, but my Yorkshire puddings aren’t what they used to be.” Sister Mary was wise. Twenty somethings, be more like sister Mary.

The day to day realities of being a florist are anything but glamorous, but if you choose to make it your career, I promise you that you’ll look back at it with pride. In all your dealings, be kind, be fair, be gracious, be rude, laugh a lot, swear a lot and don’t make mountains out of non existent molehills.

Just remember, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it takes action, perseverance, and facing your fears - Benjamin Disraeli.

House Flowers - The Importance Of Flowers In Our Homes.

As we move into a new year, and hopefully brighter days ahead; one of the most important lessons that we have all learnt over the past months is the importance of nature in our lives. Whether it’s a vegetable garden cutting patch, or even a window box, our connection to the earth has never seemed more important for our mental well being.

At the beginning of lockdown last year, I jokingly said to one of my neighbours that we were all going to be very fat bakers with perfect homes and immaculate gardens! As we spent more time than ever before at home, our personal spaces became ever more important to us, and a source of peace and tranquility in a world filled with uncertainty.

Those of us who love to garden are already well aware of the joy it brings to our lives, not to mention the health benefits. So it’s been wonderful to hear over the last year, that many people are sharing our passion and reaping the rewards, emotionally, physically and aesthetically.

Mine is a flower filled life, and I’ve known for many years that people who have flowers in their homes feel happier and more relaxed. Flowers affect us at an emotional level, and having them in the home gives a boost of energy which lasts throughout the day. Surrounding ourselves with flowers creates a sense of well being, and I believe can have both immediate and long term benefits on our emotions, mood and our overall outlook on life.

A bowl of spring flowers, picked from the garden and hedgerow is a sight to gladden the heart.

One single, perfect bloom is sometimes all’s that’s needed to bring joy into a room.

A vase overflowing with garden roses that need pruning. What could be more beautiful?

Flowers are the perfect morning pick-me up. How lovely is it to wake up to a vase of fragrant blooms on your bedside table?

When the garden gives, go big or go home! High summer bounty making a grand statement.

Little bits of this, and little bits of that. Offcuts of roses, berries and herbs from the garden make the perfect arrangement.

Wild thing, I think I love you.

To quote Claude Monet - “I must have flowers, always, and always”.