Wedding Wednesday: Flowers, Possibly

It's a fact that, outside of London, the wedding industry in the UK isn't as well-developed as it is in the US.  Finding vendors and suppliers in the countryside can be a challenge, especially when you expect American-style marketing and customer service that, often, simply doesn't exist.  We don't know anyone else who has gotten married in Suffolk recently - Jon's only the second of his friends to get engaged - so getting personal recommendations isn't an option.  However, we do trust the vendors we've already secured, which is why I asked our amazing caterers if they had suggestions for local florists.

We met up with Becky and Suzanne from Country Flowers at Bruisyard Hall while we were in Suffolk a few weeks ago, but we had emailed back and forth for a month straight before that.  They were eager to hear what sort of look we were going for and asked me to share any ideas I had - which they probably regretted when I sent them the first essay-length message with all of my thoughts!

Much of our wedding will be, hopefully, local and seasonal.  I know this is the trendy way to do things, but it's also often easier and cheaper to source perishables like flowers and food from the area.  So I went forth unto the internet (and lo: I found an abundance of goodness that multiplied like the lilies of the field and.... okay, sorry, that's enough) and researched.  Our feeling was that, as I told Becky and Suzanne, we wanted our "overarching aesthetic to be very naturally romantic - our wedding will be relatively traditional, but we don't want it to feel stuffy, though we also don't want to veer into rustic.  We'd rather have a picked-from-the-garden look than anything too conceptual."  (And yes, that is a direct quote from one of my emails.  Those women have the patience of saints.)

So, given that and taking our color scheme into consideration, I searched for information on what flowers were available in England in late summer.

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Perfect: the flowers I've been loving on Pinterest and in wedding blogs are exactly the ones that are native to England and at their peak at the end of summer!  There are so many gorgeous possibilities that use these flowers...

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The only problem with all of my thorough research, it turns out, was England's notoriously unpredictable weather.  While Becky and Suzanne admitted that these flowers are technically in season locally, it might end up being cheaper to import flowers from Holland.  And so the conversation continued...