This week it will have been a year since someone very special to me passed away. While the grey skies and flurries seem fitting for the feeling of the moment, it got me thinking about all the things that people do when planning their weddings to honour and remember someone special who has passed on.

It may something as simple as a locket with a picture in it that is tied to the handle of a bridal bouquet or a single stem of a flower in that person’s favourite colour placed inside a wedding  ceremony arrangement.

One of the most touching designs I had the honour of creating was for a client of mine this past summer.

Over the course of discussing the wedding flowers and the colours, she requested a specific flower to be used only during the ceremony whose colour and nature was not consistent with the other elements that had already been decided.

When I asked about it, she answered that her mother had passed away a few years ago and that it was her favourite flower.

I thought the tribute was so lovely and fitting and when it was all said and done, she and her groom were married under an elegant fabric draped canopy accented with stunning clusters of these beautiful flowers.

Wedding flowers are such a wonderful opportunity not only to create memories for the future, but also to look back and include in simple and thoughtful ways people and things of the past that are significant to you.

I’ve been blogging for all of a month now and I’m already starting to become controversial!

Among the long list of questions that I go through when I meet with a client, one of them is what is your favourite and least favourite flower? The response to the latter is almost always  ”I don’t like carnations”.

I take note, sometimes ask why and move on.

The creation of weddings flowers is about reflecting the vision of the bride and the groom for their wedding day. It’s never about putting my own creative ideas first. I never try to convince a bride that a certain bloom is great as a wedding flower when she’s made it clear from the beginning that she doesn’t like it.

The truth is that I have a little confession to make and I’ve been hesitating whether or not to mention it, but here it is. The truth is that I love carnations. There I wrote it. And yes, you read it correctly.

That poor flower that has long been despised for reasons I can’t understand except that I think that it’s been labeled a cheap and ugly grocery store flower and therefore, an unthinkable an option for a wedding flower.

I kept this secret of my to myself for a long time until I saw that celebrity florists were using these flowers in their high end weddings and I started to think that perhaps this flower has begun the long journey of being redeemed.

In an old fashioned arrangement, carnations are combined with baby’s breath and leather fern. These are two other items that most brides say they usually don’t care for.

However, the new style for these amazing flowers is that they are used for texture in clusters petal to petal with rarely any greenery.

Light and Bright Pink Carnation Wedding Centerpieces

They come in the most amazing selection of colours. They are also incredibly hardy meaning that they’ll look just as beautiful at the end of the evening as they did first thing in the morning.

I came to the conclusion long ago that carnations aren’t a bad flower, but perhaps the reason why it has gained such a bad reputation is because they were arranged in a less than flattering way.

While asking a wedding florist to pick her favourite flower is like asking a chef to choose only one seasoning to cook with, I’m always thrilled at the opportunity to consider carnations and I find that this opportunity presents itself more and more often as other carnation lovers come out of the closet.

Have you ever heard of a game show from the 80s called “Name That Tune”? During a consultation, there are numerous times when I feel like I’m playing the wedding flower version of that game called “Name That Wedding Flower”.

Brides bring everything from laptops and USB keys to good old fashion manila file folders overflowing  with wonderful and inspirational pictures of wedding bouquets and wedding flowers.

As a wedding florist, I find this to be one of the most interesting parts of a consultation, because while the bride may feel that there may be no rhyme or reason to her choices, a common thread, whether it by colour, flower or style is always readily apparent.

Also, while she may not know the name of every flower in every picture, as she tells me her thoughts behind every image she chose,  a floral style that is uniquely reflective of her begins to take form.

This process of going through magazines or the endless resources on the internet is one of the best ways to begin the planning of your wedding flowers.  

They can be organized in a few ways:

• by type of design: bouquet, boutonniere, centerpieces etc.
• by colour: purples in one folder, reds in another
• by flower: roses in one folder, tulips in another

The few moments that are spent doing this are well worthwhile as you will end up with wedding flowers that are not only beautiful, but intensely personal to your vision for the wedding day.

A typical day in November is gray, overcast and cold, but with the weather so unusually warm and sunny for the past few days, you’d think we skipped winter and that it was spring again.

It got me thinking about all the beautiful spring flowers that will be available in just a few short months and all the lovely bridal bouquets and wedding flowers that will be possible then.

It’s really a wedding florist’s joy to be able to work with seasonal flowers that are in their prime and not to be found at any other time of the year than in those few short months.

Elegant tulips, fragrant hyacinths and ranunculus with its circular shape and delicate petals are the flowers that are symbolic of the spring and are divine when combined together in a wedding bouquet.

It’s made even more special because spring flowers are one of the most seasonal of flowers. They start early in the year and are finished by the time you see the tulips sprouting outdoors.

These spring flowers are available in the most magnificent array of colours from soft white and pale pastels to bold and cheerful colours of yellow, orange and bright pink.

And while the colours could be combined together, sometimes there’s nothing that quite as elegant and as lovely selection of spring flowers in a singular colour to make a beautiful seasonal wedding bouquet.

Hand-tied Spring Bouquet of Tulips, Hyancinths and Ranunculus | Floret.ca