THE IMPORTANCE OF SEASONAL WEDDING FLOWERS
You may be just about to start your wedding planning adventure, or you could be deep in the midst of it. Where ever you are on your wedding journey it is important to consider the flowers that you will have on your wedding day. If you are reading this then you may well be researching seasonal wedding flowers. More and more couples are mindful of environmental impacts and are opting to have a vein of seasonality running through their wedding day, this could be in the form of local seasonal food or my favourite, seasonal flowers.
There is far more admiration now for loose and natural wedding flower arrangements. Alongside this comes an appreciation of seasonality in flowers and its importance. It seems almost ineffective to create a wild and whimsical flower arrangement if you are going to fill it with flowers that bloom traditionally in completely different seasons, such as dahlias and tulips for example. This would be doing your wedding date an injustice and would not reflect the time of year that you were married. It would be nice to look back on your March wedding and see narcissi and hellebores, that way you are transported back to your wedding day. The flowers you choose can be truly evocative of the event, their scent and their colour can evoke the memories of your wedding day.
Wild cow parsley used in church arrangements - photo by Through the Woods We Ran
It can be hard for wedding florists to choose seasonal flowers, particularly when they are solely sourced from wholesalers that import their flowers from Holland. There is often a blur in seasons and some flowers like peonies are even available in November, with the traditional window for peonies being around the month of June in the UK. Floristry is a difficult industry to work in and it is hard for florists to make a living with fluctuating flower prices and the decline of the high street, using purely seasonal flowers is not always an option when you need to run a business. We are fortunate in the UK to have a huge web of flower growers and large scale flower farms meaning more florists are including British flowers in their work. Even a few bunches of locally grown narcissi in your wedding flowers can transform the floral seasonal aesthetic and help lower your carbon footprint.
When researching flowers that are in bloom during the month of your wedding it is important to ask your florist what they would recommend and where they source their flowers from. If seasonality is key then this should be reflected in your florist’s work. It is also worth remembering that if your flowers are going to be grown locally then there may not be an accurate recipe of flowers that you can expect on your big day. Flower farmers are at the mercy of the British weather and never know what will be available! They can though be guaranteed to supply their florists with the best of the season’s produce. Succumbing to the ethos of using the best seasonal flowers available and not necessarily particular flower types is very freeing for us florists!