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.