Peonies, Roses, and More: The Top Tips for Choosing Wedding Flowers

Picking out wedding flowers might seem like a relatively small decision in the grand scheme of things. When you have a million and one other things on your plate, it’s easy to overlook the importance of choosing the right flowers for your big day.

But on average, couples spend more than $2,000 on flowers for their wedding. That equals out to about 7 percent of the average wedding budget.

With that in mind, it’s essential for couples to spend time choosing the right wedding flowers. Otherwise, they could end up either picking out the wrong flowers or spending way more than they anticipated on them.

Choosing flowers can be an overwhelming experience for some couples. There are so many options to choose from, which can make it more challenging than you might think.

Here are nine tips to make the process of picking out flowers much easier.

1. Think About How You’ll Use Flowers at Your Wedding

When most people think about wedding flowers, they think about the centerpieces that are placed on tables during wedding receptions. And while couples do obviously use flowers for this purpose, there are so many other ways that flowers are used at weddings.

How are you going to use flowers at your wedding? It’s important to answer that question before you start looking around at flowers that might be right for your nuptials.

Here are some of the most common ways in which brides and grooms often choose to use their flowers:

• A bouquet for the bride
• Bouquets for the bridesmaids
• Flowers for the flower girl
• A boutonniere for the groom
• Boutonnieres for each of the groomsmen as well as for the ushers
• Flowers to decorate the wedding ceremony

There are also some other ways in which you and your partner might opt to use flowers. You might place them on:

• Your head table
• Your gift table
• Your guest book table
• Your wedding cake table

Carefully consider where you’re going to put flowers for both your wedding ceremony and your wedding reception. This will give you a decent idea of how many floral arrangements you’ll actually need for your wedding.

2. Look at Some of the Most Popular Flowers for Weddings

Once you know how exactly you’re going to use flowers at your wedding, you can begin the process of looking around to see which wedding flowers you like. When you do this, you should focus on choosing flowers that would work best at your wedding without thinking about the cost of them just yet.

Poke around on the internet to see what some of the most popular flowers for weddings look like. You’ll find a lot of options, including:

• Roses
• Tulips
• Carnations
• Hydrangeas
• Peonies
• Gardenias

Your goal should be to see what kinds of flowers you and your partner do and don’t like. It’ll help you narrow down your search and hone in on a few types of flowers that you think would fit the look and feel of your wedding best.

3. Check the Price Tags on Different Wedding Flowers

When you’re first looking around at the different flowers for weddings that are out there, you should not spend too much time looking at the prices associated with them. That’ll take all the fun out of shopping for flowers.

But after you’ve found a few types of flowers that you might want for your wedding, you can look at the price tags on them to see how much they’ll set you back. If there are flowers that are definitely not going to fit into your wedding budget, you can cross them off your list right away.

Recommended: 6 Reasons Flowers Are Beneficial To Your Mental Health

4. Create a Budget for Your Flowers

At this point, you should have some idea of what kinds of flowers you like for your wedding and how much they’ll cost you. You’ll have all the information you need to create a budget for your wedding flowers.

Sit down and crunch the numbers to see how much you can afford to spend on flowers based on your overall wedding budget. This will come in handy when you start working with a florist and creating different floral arrangements.

5. Work With a Florist Who Is Experienced When It Comes to Weddings

Finding a florist in your city or town shouldn’t be too difficult. There are more than 30,000 flower shops located in the U.S. today.

But you shouldn’t trust just any old flower shop or florist to lend a hand with your wedding flowers. Instead, you want a florist who is experienced as far as planning for weddings is concerned.

You also want a florist who:

• Offers a wide variety of different types of flowers for weddings
• Comes equipped with excellent reviews from happy couples
• Provides competitive prices on wedding floral arrangements

Do your homework and look around for the right florist. They should be able to set you up with the flowers you’re looking for at the right price while making the entire experience as stress-free as it can be.

6. Look for Locally-Grown Flowers

“Do you sell locally-grown flowers?” is one question that you should ask a florist before you start working with them.

Outside of the fact that it’ll allow you to support those who grow local flowers, it could also save you quite a bit of money. Florists who sell locally-grown flowers are usually able to extend better prices to their customers.

You might not be able to get your hands on a huge selection when you opt to go with locally-grown flowers over flowers grown elsewhere and shipped into your florist. But it’ll help you stay well within your budget when you take this approach.

7. Consider Alternatives to Pricy Flower Options

In addition to speaking with your florist about buying locally-grown flowers, you should also inquire about alternatives to any pricy flowers that you like.

For example, hydrangeas have turned into some of the most popular wedding flowers when it comes to creating centerpieces. The right hydrangeas can make a strong statement when they’re placed onto tables at wedding receptions.

The problem, though, is that hydrangeas can stretch your budget when you’re buying flowers for your wedding. If you have 25 tables at your wedding, it’s going to cost a small fortune to outfit each one with hydrangeas.

Instead, your florist can use carnations to create centerpieces that look just like hydrangeas—at just a fraction of the cost! Your florist might also be able to show you some other inexpensive flowers that look similar to their more expensive counterparts.

8. Find Unique Ways to Set Your Wedding Flowers Apart

When people walk into your wedding ceremony or reception and see the flowers that you’ve picked out, you want them to be amazed. You want people to see the flowers and say, “I’ve never seen flowers used like that at a wedding before!”

There are some couples who are under the impression that they have to spend top dollar to get that kind of reaction. But that couldn’t be further from the truth! They can also come up with unique ways to make their floral arrangements special.

One way couples are doing this is by investing in one-of-a-kind containers to hold their flowers. Rather than going with regular old vases, you can go with wooden boxes or other containers that aren’t always found at weddings.

You might also want to incorporate other items into your floral arrangements to set them apart from arrangements people have seen in the past. You can use things like:

• Buttons
• Seashells
• Ribbons
• Candies
• Photos

By thinking outside the box, you can create floral arrangements that will wow everyone in attendance at your wedding.

9. Make Sure You Trust Your Florist to Deliver Your Flowers

You can pick out the most amazing flowers for your wedding. But if they don’t arrive on time, it’ll all be for naught.

It’s important to work with a flower delivery service that can get your wedding flowers to your venue ahead of schedule so that there is more than enough time to set them up. There should also be separate flower shipments for those in the wedding party.

Feel free to ask a florist how they go about delivering flowers on a couple’s wedding day. They should have a clear-cut plan in place for how they do it to ensure that all flowers make it on time.

Start Shopping for Wedding Flowers Today

As you can see, shopping for wedding flowers isn’t quite as simple as just finding flowers you like and buying them. You will likely have to shop around to find the right flowers at the right price before committing to buying them for your wedding.

The key is knowing what you want before you start working with a florist and sticking to your predetermined budget. As long as you do those things, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about picking out the right flowers or overspending on them.

Keep browsing our blog for more articles on planning the perfect wedding.

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