The meaning of giving and choosing specific flowersFlowers are an important part of many wedding celebrations. It is always good to spend time thinking about which flowers you will choose for the bride’s bouquet as well as the table centrepieces. This may depend on what time of year it is and what happens to be in bloom, but many flowers also have meanings that you should be aware of. Have in mind the colour you want to choose first of all. If you have a colour theme prepared for your wedding you will want to choose flowers that blend in with that. But you also want to think about the message you want to convey with your chosen flowers. For example, red chrysanthemums mean ‘I love you’. What better message could there be for a wedding? Yellow irises meanwhile convey passion, which could also be very appropriate for a wedding! Think about different combinations of wedding flowers as well, and what the combined meanings could point to. For example a combination of red and white chrysanthemums would give out a nice message, since the white variety means truth. So the combined message would tell people that the message ‘I love you’ stands for truth. Of course you can get too bogged down in trying to go for the best meanings and forget about the look of the flowers themselves. There might be some that you simply don’t like, or the flower with the nicest meaning won’t fit in with your colour scheme. It is always wise to check the meanings of specific flowers before opting for any of them though. You don’t want to have a nice display and then find out all the flowers mean something inappropriate for your wedding day. For example dahlias apparently mean instability! Not the best start for your married life together, is it? Another good example is not to opt for a flower simply because it sounds nice. There is a flower called ‘love in mist’ which sounds like an ideal choice for a wedding. But the meaning of this particular flower is perplexity, which basically means confusion. It may have a nice name but it obviously isn’t ideal for a wedding bouquet or for the table decorations. Sometimes the best way to go is to look at the various meanings of flowers and see if any stand out as being particularly appropriate to you both on your wedding day. You can then think of flowers you both like and check that their meanings will be good for the day as well. Some countries may have different meanings attached to various flowers though, so if you research online be sure you find a UK website to look on. Sometimes meanings of certain flowers will change through time as well. For example yellow roses used to mean infidelity in some circles, but nowadays most people know that they stand for quite the opposite. Now they mean that love will last forever, which is a much more positive reason to use them at your wedding. Source: www.countywedding .co.uk

Keeping the bouquetThe bride’s bouquet forms an integral part of her wedding dress in a sense. Everyone will remember the bride holding the bouquet as she walks up the aisle to take her vows, and it makes sense that you would want to preserve it if you can. And even though real flowers will be used for the bouquet there is no reason why you cannot keep them for a long time if you preserve them in the right way. If you are good at pressing flowers, your skills will come in extremely handy at this stage. You will need to take the whole bouquet apart to do this, but before you do so make sure you take some close up photographs of it. Don’t rely on the wedding pictures for this – take some of your own from every angle and also from the top looking down. This will give you plenty to go on when it comes to rearranging the dried flowers later on. Put every petal, leaf and stem through the drying process, and when they are all dry you can start arranging them on a flat surface to create the picture you want. This can then be framed when everything is positioned in place and hung on the wall for everyone to admire. This is where the pictures you took will come in handy. They give you a 2D representation of your bouquet to use when you try to recreate it on a flat surface for the picture frame. It’s amazing how much easier you will be able to do this with some Polaroids to guide you! The good news is that there are people who will take on this task for you if you don’t feel you can do it yourself. It does take some time and if you are restricted time wise you are better off paying the professionals – you only have a certain amount of time to preserve your bouquet before it dies. The professionals will use one of two main methods. The first one is freeze drying. This enables you to keep the bouquet exactly as it was when you held it. The second method is pressing, which obviously means it is flatter and it can be framed in this way. You can dry your bouquet and then leave it assembled in a vase just like any other flowers. But the downside of this is that they will be extremely fragile. Even the slightest knock could destroy them, which is why some people prefer to use the pressing method to complete the job. Consider which method you would prefer to use and then make plans to follow through with it before the actual wedding. If you are going to use a professional perhaps you could ask a member of your wedding party to take the bouquet to them after the wedding, while you head off on your honeymoon. This way you will know that it is being taken care of while it is still fresh. Source: www.countywedding .co.uk

What to do with the wedding flowers afterwardsFlowers are an integral part of many weddings. From the bride’s bouquet to the flowers that stand on all the tables at the reception, you can expect to have a lot left over once the big day is over and the wedding has taken place. So what can you do with them all? It is a waste to simply get rid of them, and when it comes to the bouquet you may well want to keep it as a memento.So where do you start?Fortunately preserving a wedding bouquet can be done quite easily. There are professional services that make this a possibility for you. They can actually preserve it so that it looks exactly as it did on the big day. If you are going to have this done you need to think about how you will store it because it will be quite fragile by nature. You might want to invest in a strong and sturdy box to keep it in. If you have it on display somewhere in your home there is always the possibility that someone will knock into it and break it.But what can you do with the rest of your wedding day flowers?Can you preserve those as well, or are there other things you can do with them? One lovely idea is to give away a table decoration made from flowers as a gift. Perhaps you could give one to the parents of the bride and one to the parents of the groom? If you are going to do this you need to agree between the two of you who you want to donate them to in advance of the big day. Then you can be ready to present them to the people you have chosen once the day is over. If you are both leaving for your honeymoon before the party ends, you could entrust one of the bridesmaids or perhaps the best man to make sure these gifts reach the right people. This will ensure that they don’t get forgotten or binned when you actually wanted them to go to someone special. Another idea is to take one of the table decorations home yourself to do something with. You don’t have to preserve it as it is, but you can take leaves and petals from flowers and dry them separately at home. You can buy flower pressing kits quite cheaply to do this with, but it is easy enough to do without them if you have some heavy books to hand. Make sure the flowers aren’t wet from being watered and use a sheet or two of paper to protect the book from the flower petals themselves. This makes the petals easier to lift out as well. Pressing flowers takes time but if you persevere with it you can enjoy using these dried flowers to add decoration to your wedding photo album. They can provide a nice personal touch and another memory of your big day. Source: www.countywedding .co.uk