How to Choose your Wedding Flowers

Some Basic Considerations

Your wedding flowers are one of the most important decisions you'll make for your wedding. They are one of the main focal points in your wedding photos and if you get them right then they'll serve to tie your whole theme together, beautifully.  Your wedding dress is the main centrepiece of course, but your flowers are the second main attraction.  Your bridal bouquet, bridesmaids posies, buttonholes and corsages should all help coordinate your colour scheme and the fine details should be carefully considered. Your wedding bouquet will enhance your dress but will also reflect your own personal style and ultimately portray a statement about you.  Flowers say a lot about a person and their personality can often portrayed by their choices. Your flowers will provide the finishing touches to everything and it's important to get them just right!

The Role of your Wedding Flowers

Some people will place a greater emphasis on their wedding flowers than others. Some may see elaborate floral displays as a necessity with sensational designs that will absolutely wow all their guests. Others may see them as an elaborate expense that's best minimised to make way for other more important things. A lot of the time it will depend on the style of wedding that's planned. Whichever category you fall under, your wedding flowers should have an individual look, specially created for you.

As stated in the introduction, your flower choices will portray a little about your personality and whether you go for elaborate displays or modest ones will shed a little insight on you. Don't be afraid to express yourself with your flowers and the use of colours. Consider whether you'd like to make a statement or keep it modest.

Areas to consider for your wedding flowers are your bridal bouquet and the bouquets and posies for the rest of your wedding party. Flowers for the church can be placed at the pew ends, on the altar or on the steps at the alter, window sills around the inside of the church or around candelabras and columns. Even the wedding car could be adorned with beautiful flowers.

Churches displays should be large to be effective or the open space of most churches will just dwarf your displays and make them look small. Budget will play a large part in most cases but if you're going all out with your flowers then you might even consider a floral decorated arch or arbor for the end of the aisle or a carpet of rose petals and flowers all around the hall, the dance floor and the reception. If you have a generous budget for your flowers then you can really make a statement!

The Bridal Bouquet

Let's address your bridal bouquet as this is the most personal floral arrangement for your wedding and you really shouldn't hold back on this. Your wedding bouquet should be the centre piece for all of the other flowers and it should be larger than the other bouquets and a lot more special.

There are so many designs to choose from and the bridal bouquet is often the starting point when you're choosing your flowers. Your bridal bouquet should be the most elaborate. It serves as the centrepiece around which your other flowers are designed. It's best not to skimp with your own wedding bouquet as you will want your wedding pictures to look the best they can.

The choice of flowers for the brides bouquet will depend on your own personal tastes, the colours of your wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses and the general colour theme. Your height and shape should also be considered as certain shapes of bouquet will compliment certain figures and body shapes and can even help to make you look taller or more slender if you can achieve the correct balance with the design of the dress and flowers combined.

We always recommended that you don't finalise your bridal bouquet until you've chosen your wedding dress as the two must match and usually larger dresses need larger bouquets. Full a-line dresses look better when they're complimented by a long, cascading bouquet. Slender, fitted dresses can look best with a rounded posy. Shy not send us a picture of your dress and we'll be able to tell you what shapes might go best.

There are so many different shapes and sizes when it comes to wedding bouquets. Rounded posies, cascading bouquets, full shower bouquets and irregular shapes, teardrop bouquets, long thin wired bouquets, even pomanders!

Rounded posies are a really popular choice and are the most traditional shape when you look at the history of the wedding bouquet. This shape lends itself to all flower species but it's particularly common to have roses, peonies and gerberas with hints of greenery.

Cascading bouquets or 'trailing bouquets' are another very popular choice and these are well suited to full bodied a-line dresses with a full skirt section. This shape of bouquet will tend to overpower slim, fitted dresses because of the shape. Some class the cascading bouquet as a more formal approach to wedding flowers. However, cascades give us florists a lot of scope to be really creative with lots of really intricate wiring and fine detailing. These bouquets are best when orchids are used in the cascade but just about any flower can be used to create a spectacular cascading bouquet.

Full shower bouquets are generally aimed at those brides who don't like symmetry and prefer irregular but natural shapes. Country garden bouquets and natural designs, just tied off loosely can serve to create a look that's very modern and contemporary but simple as well.

Teardrops are like a cross between a cascade and a posy and take their name from the shape of a teardrop. One of the most popular choices as these go with a wide variety of dresses and they are so easy to adapt using any flower species.

A pomander or 'kissing ball' is more often used for flower girls or bridesmaids but you can have these for your bridal bouquet too. Pomanders are just hung from the arm on a ribbon or crystal chain with a rounded ball of flowers.

Long, thinly wired bouquets look really beautiful when they're made of simple orchid heads, wired together with pearls or bear grass. Lilies look amazing in this style too. This shape of bouquet is particularly suited to slim fitting wedding gowns.

Whether it's a modern or a traditional look that you're after, you can have any shape or colour or species with artificial wedding flowers. Exotic or time-honoured flowers, in any colour or size or shape. The combinations and permutations are endless but all are achievable at Silk Blooms.

Consider the fine details of your bouquet. Are you a big fan of bling and crystals? What about pearls and feathers? Butterflies and ladybugs? You can be really creative with a whole host of different embellishments. Let us know what you like and whether or not to include them in your design. These fine details can often turn a modest bouquet into a real work of art!

So, what about the ribbons? What colours do you choose? What material? How wide? How long? It's common to have a ribbon colour on the bridal bouquet that matches your bridesmaids dresses. Accompany this with some crystal embellishments to help bring out the colours. Add a splash of matching flora and it will really come together. This is what separates a good florist from a master florist. The fine details!

So much to consider! It's best to speak to your florist in more detail. Talk to them about your theme and your ideas and let your florist offer you advice. Come to Silk Blooms where the advise is free and where we give you one on one attention. All of our customers are extremely important to us. It's your wedding day and we want it to be special!

The Bridesmaids Bouquets

The bridesmaids' flowers will be smaller that the bridal bouquet and nine times out ten the bridesmaids have hand tied posies. Generally, the bridesmaids bouquets should match your own in terms of the colours and the flowers that are used. However, it's not uncommon to have inverted colours, so the exact opposite of the bridal bouquet. The logic here is when the bride is wearing white or ivory and picks up on the bridesmaids dress with a splash of colour in her bridal bouquet. The bridesmaids in turn have the opposite colours to compliment the bride. If you do select different colours then try to make sure that the colours blend well with your bouquet and compliment the overall theme. Good coordination is the key!

It's a good idea to give your maid of honour a bouquet that's a bit more special than the other bridesmaids. Just as you do with the grooms buttonhole. This adds a nice touch and shows her that she's just that little bit more appreciated. Just adding some extra flowers or making it a tad larger. Anything that makes her stand out a bit will be welcomed by your maid of honour.

Pomanders and wrist corsages are also very popular choices for a bridesmaids flowers. The wrist corsages are a good way to minimise the spend but they're also very good for complimenting the bridesmaids bouquets. Hair combs or clips can be used to accompany their bouquets as well. You might even decide on matching hair flowers for yourself.

As with your own flowers, you should take a good look through our website and Google Images for inspiration. There's so many inspiring designs out there and you're sure to find the ones that you like. When you do, just email us your pictures and we'll modify or adapt them to suit your theme.

Bridesmaids can be adults all the way down to toddlers so you need to think about your teenage and baby flower girls too. Pomanders work fantastically well with toddlers as we can create really gorgeous designs that attach to ribbons and in turn attach to a Velcro wrist bracelet that straps to their arm. That way, the toddlers can't drop them or throw them. The little pomanders and wands are so cute and all florists just love to create these! They can be ever so girly with butterflies and ribbon frills galore.

Flower girls can have wands or baskets with petals to toss on the aisle as they walk you to the alter. Whichever the designs that you choose, we will be able to coordinate all of your flowers in a complete new theme that's designed specifically to you. We offer a free, bespoke design service so your flowers can be tailor made for you.

Flowergirls Flowers

The flowergirls are the cutest part of your wedding party. When they're all done up in their little gowns with their hair all dressed and their little flower arrangements they look just about as cute as a cupcake! You take maximise their cuteness and accessorise them with flowers. Flowergirls look amazing in the wedding photos and the flowers you give them just adds to this.

Put a little floral comb in her hair and the cuteness levels increase. A halo or perhaps just a comb or a clip with a few small rose buds. Give her a tiny little pomander and the cuteness levels just go to the max. Flower girls with pomanders are about as cute as cute can be.

Often you'll want your flowergirl to carry a basket of flowers to match the other bridesmaids bouquets. The basket can be any shade or colour and so can the flowers. It's an option to add loose rose petals to her basket so she can thrown them on the aisle runner.

Wrist corsages are particularly suitable for flowergirls as well. These can be attached to ribbon or even attached to adjustable Velcro wrist slings. Either way, they look really lovely and they can be any size to suit her age and match the rest of her flowers.

Wands are one of the most popular options for flowergirls. Again, they're really cute and they can be dressed off with ribbons and matching frills so they tie in perfectly with your theme.

Your flower girl will be over the moon with any of the flower options from Silk Blooms. All of our staff absolutely love making the flowers for flowergirls and we always add some really nice special touches to grab the girls attention. Everyone loves them!

Buttonholes

These are just as important as the other flowers as they'll have to tie in with your theme and they will play a part in your wedding photos. Don't scrimp and scrape on cheap buttonholes as they're a reflection on the overall look of your wedding flowers. It's well worth spending an extra few pennies to get really, really nice buttonholes.

The grooms buttonhole should be designed to tie in with your bouquet. It should match it perfectly in fact. Not only does this symbolise your unity, it will also look fantastic in your photos.

The best man and the fathers should also have buttonholes that are a bit more special than the guests.

The guest and pageboy buttonholes can be more simple, usually just single roses or single lilies with ribbons to bring everything together in the same colour theme.

The more popular flowers for buttonholes are roses, orchids, calla lilies and gerberas. However, practically any flower can be used for the men's buttonholes.

Corsages

As discussed above, wrist corsages for the bridesmaids and hand corsages or even ring corsages can really help to accessorise your day. However, when we talk about pin on corsages it's usually the ones for the mums. These should be really nice and certainly befitting of your mums with matching flowers, ribbons and trims. The mum's usually have pin on corsages with built in corsage pins but occasionally they might prefer their flowers sitting on a stretchy pearl bracelet with flora and crystals matches your other flowers. We are often asked to add highlight colours to pick up on the mum's outfit colour too. The corsages should complement their outfits but it's important that they also tie in with the overall theme.

Your grandmothers and aunts might want corsages too. It's normal for them to pay for their own but it's important that they go to the same florist and let the florist know that their corsages are to tie in with your other flowers. Usually we can fit them in the same box and ship them all together to save on postage costs.

Since the mum's and nan's and aunts tend to choose their own outfit, it's sometimes safer to go with neutral colours like white or ivory.

Table Displays

This is a completely different thing to the flowers that you'll carry and wear.  Table centrepieces are your opportunity to Make the biggest impression.  Remember, your guests will be sitting up close to the centrepieces all through the reception and the evening meal.

Make sure not to block the view of the people sitting across the table from one another.  If you want really elaborate table displays then look at something that's low and wide so the guests can see over it.  Alternatively, consider something that sits tall above them so they can see through or under it.

As with all your wedding flowers, you should choose the species and colours that will tie in with the rest of the theme.  Use Google Images for inspiration and remember we are able to replicate, modify and adapt anything that you can find anywhere else on the net.  There's just so much to choose from with table displays for weddings and the possibilities are literally endless.

The standard choices for the guest table displays range from vase arrangements, table posies, topiary trees and candelabras through to Martini glasses, cocktail glasses and mirrored cubes.  However, don't be afraid to use your creative side as there are just so many options.  Birdcages and quirky jugs can add a real flare to your guest table designs.

The top table flowers are traditionally made in a long and low design that's intended to create the perception of grandness and opulence.  Large, oval shaped arrangements to sit in front of bride and groom, with smaller posies for each end of the table.  Garlands to swag the front of your top table are also quite commonplace.  Most brides like to really splash out on the their top table arrangements and they really set the mood and they are a real statement in themselves.  Long and low top table displays can vary in length from as little as twenty inches to as long as six foot or more.  Your budget will usually determine the length of your top table display.