Wedding Flowers

It is traditional, particularly in the UK for a bride to carry flowers on her wedding day and for everywhere else to be festooned with flowers. In the distant past it was believed that if a bride had flowers at her wedding, then it would ward off any evil spirits that might want to spoil the day and harm the couple's marriage. Herbs as well as flowers were believed to attract positive, rather than negative energy into the lives of the newly married couple. Although most people no longer hold to the superstitions of the past, a woman's wedding day is one of the most important days in her life. Whether or not you believe that flowers bring good fortune, beautiful blooms are still seen as an integral part of any traditional wedding in the UK.

Couples who plan on having a traditional white wedding, whether it is at a church, registry office, or some other venue, will generally have numerous different flowers to help celebrate the occasion.

Florally speaking, the bride's wedding bouquet is the most important of any wedding and may consist of anything from a small bouquet of mixed flowers through to a sumptuous, trailing garland of red roses. The type of flowers you have at a wedding will depend on the time of year at which you plan to marry. It may be a simple matter these days to obtain virtually any flower out of season, but many traditional couples prefer to stick with something appropriate to the season. Others may also wish to minimise the carbon footprint of their ceremony by obviating the need to import out of season blooms from abroad.

Whilst the bride may have some beautiful blooms in her bouquet, she may also have a flowered headdress. The groom on the other hand, is generally restricted to a single flower in the buttonhole, usually, but not always, a carnation. In addition to the groom's buttonhole and the bride's bouquet and possibly her headdress, the bridesmaids, if there are any, will also carry posies. At most traditional weddings the bride, bridegroom and bridesmaids will thus be most heavily adorned with wedding flowers. In many cases, the bridesmaids are referred to as flower girls, not simply because they carry their own posy but because the chief bridesmaid is the person to whom the bride will traditionally hand her bouquet during the main ceremony. However, most if not all of the important guests will also have some sort of bloom in their buttonhole, both men and women.

It is traditional, when a couple marries in a church, for there to be some flowers on the altar, as well as vases of flowers placed on ledges around the church, visible to the congregation. Many wedding ceremonies are followed by a traditional wedding breakfast. Here, both the tables and other available surfaces may contain a variety of different blooms, often in keeping with the bride's intended colour scheme for the event.

Whether a couple is to be married in church or not, the tradition for beautiful wedding flowers has remained a large part of almost any wedding ceremony. All weddings are special and deserve a superb array of flowers to celebrate that fact.