Wedding Wildflowers

If you have started your wedding planning, then you've already discovered that there is a magic word that will automatically quadruple any price quote:  "Wedding"

But if you're like me, you don't feel comfortable lying.  Or at least you're just really bad at it.  

Either way, there are ways to cut costs and you can choose all of them or just some.  No doubt, you've started to prioritize about what you don't want to skimp on.  

Now I love flowers and greens, but with our limited budget, I decided early on that I was not going to hire a florist.  At all.  With a July wedding in the Poconos, I knew that there would be enough foliage in the natural setting that we had chosen.  

First, I obsessed.  Every time we were driving around near our location, I noted flowers:   Where they grew wild, which ones fit our color palate (cranberry and butter yellow) and kept a look out for interesting textures, all growing in fields and along roadsides (never someone's garden! Hello!).  There were so many varieties, some I'd never noticed before.

Next, I gathered some and made my first practice bouquet.  It was not only beautiful and simple, but seemed to reflect the setting we'd chosen much more than store bought roses.   

Then, I gathered my Renaissance Girls.  

When shopping for other decor, I found the perfect cranberry velvet ribbon and my magical sister-in-law Marie (who also decorated the arbor, pictured here) bought artificial berries that represented the wild blueberries that Ted and I often pick together (We decided real blueberries could stain...).

The day before the wedding, I put three oversized vases with water, two pairs of garden shears,  and my friend Elizabeth (now on tour in Xanadu.  Hi, Elizabeth!) into the car and drove around the countryside to the places I'd remembered had the flowers I liked.  We spent about an hour filling the vases with ferns, tiny daisies, and 

beautiful wild flowers.  Then we put them in the cool basement where they stayed fresh overnight.  

The next day, Marie arranged most of the flowers into vases for the reception and Elizabeth and I created the bouquet that I would carry down the aisle and tied it with the ribbon.  It was a perfect compliment for my antique home-made linen wedding dress and Ted's pinstripe grey suit.  

Now,  some people want to hire a florist and avoid  this extra work, but in the end, picking and arranging flowers with my girls was an incredibly wonderful way to spend the morning before my wedding.

And let's face it.  So was knowing that I saved thousands of dollars.  

(Wedding Photography by WeClick.com)