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Every time I hear of wedding bouquets costing hundreds of pounds I fail to be impressed. The amount of attention I gave to my own wedding bouquet was minimal and I think it had my mother quite worried.

We had a general theme for the wedding called “sweet peas”.  I did at first intend to have sweet peas everywhere.  This soon developed into a colour scheme of  green and purpleish nuances.

As for the sweet peas, my mother planted some in early April, kept them in the greenhouse, nurtured them and talked to them and of course they blossomed three days after the wedding.

Oh well, they were lovely shades of green on the wedding day and it all helped decorate the tent anyway.

Table decorations

For the decorations I had a vision, inspired by the book ‘Simple Stunning Weddings’, where one of the ideas was a collection of old vases with different flowers.

This idea appealed to me because it looked simple and elegant and could be done with minimum effort on a budget. We made a deal with the local florist that she would get flowers from the market in the right colours. This way we got what was in season at a very reasonable price. For the vases we used what my mother had lying around and topped these up with vases from local charity shops.

On each table we put a single flower stem in a high narrow vase, a little bouquet in a medium height vase and a little bouquet of a green herb (different one for each table) in a low, small vase.

We also had three tea lights (soy candles) on each table in glasses of three different heights for when it got dark.

The wedding bouquet

I also had the idea of having a simple, tight bunch of lavender as a bouquet. I would then wind around the stems the ribbon from my grandmother’s wedding bouquet from the ’40s.

Unfortunately, my mother’s lavender died before the wedding, causing another worry for her. 

It did not faze me, however. I just made a lovely bouquet of the leftover flowers from the decorations and tied my grandmother’s ribbon around it. I was very happy with the result.

Flexible flower arranging

At the end of the day I was really happy with all the flowers at the wedding. We used very few seasonal, cut flowers for the decoration and bouquet and mostly decorated the tent and garden with potted plants and flowers.

I think the flowers reflect the rest of the wedding preparations. I would get an idea, which we would use as a guideline. But we never made any plans set in stone, which meant that nothing could really go wrong. We had the most perfect wedding because we never tried to force it to be perfect.

Henriette
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