Snapdragon's garden: Claire and Kieran's wedding

August 27, 2009

Claire and Kieran's wedding

Yesterday I was back in East Lothian where I grew up, arranging flowers for a couple who were getting married looking out over the sea in the Marine Hotel in North Berwick.
The brief was originally for an outdoor ceremony but the truly awful weather we have been having put paid to that, so I tried to bring a bit of the sea and limpid colours into the flowers.

These are the buckets of foliage parked on the workshop deck.
cerinthe, mint, poppy seed-heads and white willow herb seedpods.

The table centres were designed to split into 4 bunches which were given away as favours. There were 2 different colour schemes - white and lilac above and below and pink (which i omitted to photograph it seems!)

The bride and bridesmaid's bouquets were the bit that was most stressful due to the weather - they were to be pink and densely flowery - no chance to add in bits of rain resistant foliage.
I seemed to spend hours picking of bits of wet yucky disgusting petals from inside dahlias but in the end it was undetectable. Just shows. Flowers are more resilient than you think.

There were also 2 large urns framing the ceremony - Claire, the bride phoned me this morning to say thanks and described them as an "enchanted forest" - of fennel, eupatorium, willowherb, plum tart gladioli and rip city dahlias with a cloud of stipa gigantea seedheads lightening the mix. She has photos but I don't!

At the start of the week I was beside myself with worry about whether there would be any flower and cursing myself for being such a stickler for the home grown. now I am very glad that i held my nerve and very glad that tweezers can rescue dahlias from mush.

Posted at 01:03 PM in Weddings | Permalink