How I’m Planning *My Own* Wedding Flowers

I’m getting married this year!

My partner and I have been engaged for almost 3 years (thanks, covid-19). We rescheduled our wedding multiple times, hoping to have a celebration where we could all dance together and hug our family without face masks. Hopefully 2022 is that year!

Either way, we’re getting married. It’s happening.

Of course, I’ll be doing the flowers for my wedding! Or rather, the Sea Change crew as a whole will be 😉

Planning out the flowers for my wedding is a fun process for me, and it’s similar to the way we plan flowers for our clients’ weddings. So I wanted to share what this looks like behind the scenes!

Choosing a Color Palette for My Wedding Flowers

First things first: what is the color and style we’re going for?

I always ask wedding clients this the first time we speak. I love looking at inspiration photos and hearing what inspires them!

For me, this discussion also had to involve my partner–he’s getting married, too, after all! And he did *not* love my first mood board:

Brandon said this color palette looked sad and desaturated and dead. Which it does. What can I say? I love dead flowers.

We talked and decided that we wanted the following words to describe our wedding celebration: “fun,” “joyous,” “bright.” My first mood board definitely wasn’t capturing those vibes!

We decided on bright yellow and gold colors, and I made a new mood board.

Definitely less dead-feeling! Brandon approves.

It’s fun! It’s joyous! It’s bright! And, it’s a fairly unusual color palette, which will help my wedding flowers feel new & interesting for me to design and grow.

Fleshing Out the Palette with Pictures

Next, I found some images of yellow floral arrangements that I loved. You can see my full collection on pinterest! But here’s my favorite:

You might recognize this image from my post on building color palettes from an inspiration photo!

I love this photo because it feels light and summery. This arrangement has a lot of texture. It uses foliage sparsely and thoughtfully. The bright yellow hues are the focus, but they’re softened by creamy white tones. There are also some deeper pops of golden-orange in there that really ground the arrangement.

This photo inspired my wedding flower color palette:

I added some smoky pinks and a touch of purple in there, because I can! I think our flowers will look very nice with a tiny bit of those softer colors.

Now that we have a color palette, it’s time to think about what specific flowers we could use to bring this palette to life.

Flower Variety Selection & Brainstorming

Some colors are always in high demand, like white and blush and burgundy for our wedding florists. I put special effort into growing a wide range of flowers in these popular colors, so that we always have those colors blooming in our field.

Yellow, it turns out, is not one of those all-popular colors! Doing an all-yellow wedding requires a little more special handling.

So first, I made a big list, in visual form, of all the yellow flowers we could possibly and/or realistically grow in September.

That’s a lot of flowers!

Next, I translated this image list to a written one, organizing the flowers into categories based on their shape and the functions they serve in an arrangement:

I want to introduce you to some of these flowers. You’re probably already familiar with some of them, but there are others on this list that are a bit out-there, and that I’m extra-excited to include in my wedding flower crop plan.

Foxgloves – Cafe Creme

Man oh man do I love Cafe Creme foxgloves! They are just so interesting and weird! I would love to include a few of these in my wedding bouquet as special accent flowers. These brown lovelies will add a touch of earthy funkiness in to ground our bright yellow flowers.

Cafe Creme foxgloves are a biennial, which means they bloom in their second growing season. So it’s too late to start them from seed now for a wedding this year! Luckily we started some from seed last summer, and the plants are currently sleeping out in the field under our latest snowfall. Fingers crossed that those little plants make it through the winter and bloom lovely blooms for our wedding.

Dahlias – Bishop of York, Platinum Blonde

There will without a doubt be dahlias at my wedding. Tons of them! I’ve ordered some new yellow dahlias, like “Bishop of York” pictured on the left, to add to our own yellow tuber stock like “Platinum Blonde” on the right.

“Platinum Blonde” is actually in the inspiration photo I put above–can you spot it?

Phlox – Dulce de Leche

You can’t plan wedding flowers with at least a little Floret inspiration, amirite? I just purchased seeds for this beautiful, soft, creamy-yellow phlox.

We have never grown phlox successfully at Sea Change. But I’m working on a game plan to perfect this newish crop so we can use it in my wedding flowers. I can just imagine this phlox being the perfect fluffy filler flower in those centerpieces.

California Poppy – Thai Silk Pink Champagne

This little gem of a flower is also in the inspiration photo! Can you see these poppies in that centerpiece?

I have always loved poppies, and we grew a small experimental patch of these specific California poppies last year. They were lovely in the field but a little perplexing in the vase, so further experimentation is needed before they’re ready for prime time at my wedding.

Looking at all these images of flowers helps me start to visualize my wedding flowers. I can also show these pictures to my partner, so he can start to imagine the flowers as well.

This is all a great starting point for the wedding flower crop plan! But, this big list of blooms isn’t quite ready to be thrown into a crop plan just yet.

In Part 2 of this post, I’ll share how we go from this–a beautiful, inspirational, word and picture braindump–to a fully realized crop plan and concrete planting schedule. To bring my wedding flower dreams to life!