Wedding Flowers on a Budget

My daughter's wedding colors were lilac and sapphire, and were beautifully offset with a range of pinks, violets, and magenta in the flower arrangements,

When my daughter was married 10 years ago, I hired, and went on to learn a fantastic amount from, a floral designed with many decades of experience on how to create large and beautiful wedding arrangements by mixing cuttings from a well-planned garden with carefully chosen commercially purchased flowers. Her method emphasized combining of colors and textures to set off the bride's chosen colors in a variety of bouquets, pew wreaths, boutonnieres, corsages, centerpieces, and decorations for the buffet table. This was all achieved for less than $600.

Many of the blooms came from the designer's personal garden.

Never Live Without Flowers

I cannot repeat it enough: Never live without flowers. A wild stem can always be found for plucking; even in New York's concrete jungle there are little patches of green sending up their blossoms in springtime and millions of windowsills that would welcome a variegated African violet.

The Tansy Fairy uses tansy blossoms for buttons on her playmate's jacket. You can use them as bright fillers in bouquets and arrangements, 

Peonies!

Peonies, a hearty and relatively rapid growing perennial  can't be beat for a stunning, single flower bouquet.

Out here in rural Virginia, the peonies are in heavy bud, just beginning to burst. Every year at this time, these glorious blooms remind me of how much I depend on flowers to create a pleasant and relaxing atmosphere in my home. I'm sure that this is because of the peony vendor I depended on 30 years ago when I was living in New York City and there was very little to pick from nature. He faithfully brought his bouquets to the corner of Broadway and 86th Street in Manhattan every spring, trading an armful of the giant pink blossoms (more than a dozen as I remember) for $5 in cash--no small amount to  set aside from the weekly budget, but worth every penny. Now happily esconced in the country, I can have these beauties in my own front yard.

Rose Hips: A Splendid Gift of Autumn

The rose hips fairy from British naturalist Cicely Mary Barker, whose fanciful depictions of flowers, weeds, and seed pods were known for their accuracy of botanical detail. 

Rose hips at the center of an autumn bouquet, gathered in the back yard, 

Don't turn your backs on your rose bushes as cool weather approaches. They have one more gift to offer up in thanks for the watering, trimming, fertilizing and Japanese beetle battling you have persisted in since spring: their beautiful brilliant red seed pods known as hips. There is viritually no more stunning accent to be found for a September bouquet, and some cultivars produce hips up to an inch in diameter.