Sustainable Personal Finance

Sustainable Wedding: Flowers and Decorations

As I described in an earlier post, the sustainable wedding venue for our wedding were stone buildings and beautiful gardens with lots of detail. So in terms of decorations, we did not need to go over the top and decorate every square inch of the place, the architecture itself was decorative.  I did think a lot about whether to get flowers to decorate with and if so, where to purchase them from and at what cost. I did not want to import flowers and yet it was early October so local flowers were not in high supply. I decided to go with dried flowers instead. I at first considered some dried flower arrangements from our local farmers market but they were not exactly what I had in mind plus they were outside of our budget. Instead I headed to a large arts and crafts store and started assembling. I spent hours in that store assembling and re-assembling different arrangements until I was finally happy with something.

A friend of mine had mentioned she was going to use mason jars as the vases for her center pieces at her wedding. I thought that was a great idea and as it turned out my brother was planning on purchasing a crate full of them for some canning later that month. In order to hold the flowers in place in the jars and prevent them from toppling over, we used small stones. These stones came from excess that was used to tile my parents shower stall floor at their cottage. I felt the centerpieces still needed a little something extra so I surrounded each jar of flowers with small gourds and pumpkins, picked up from our local farmers market the week before the wedding by Sustainable PF. For the rest of the reception hall I strung up dried berries and placed more gourds and pumpkins on tables.

For the outside venue I strung up dried berries along the archway but the real centerpiece of that setting were the globes created by my brother.  The domes were created with twine and then covered with leaves and propped on sticks so they formed the aisle. See the picture to get a better idea. And when I say I placed, for the most part although I had planned out where things went, my brother and other family members did most of the setting up and taking down. They were so awesome!

Now for the flowers for myself and the bridesmaids, I used both silk and dried flowers. The flowers believe it or not I found at a dollar discount store in Montreal. Each bridesmaid had one long stemmed red flower with a piece of silk tied up at the bottom (leftover from my dress). My sister, my maid of honour, had red and white flowers.  My own bouquet was created by my sister. She included the same flowers as the bridesmaids but more of them and added in dried flowers she had at home. It looked stunning! And honestly I don’t k now if you could tell they were fake. Our photographer thought the bouquets were stunning and spent quite a few shots on them.

We also also wanted our the groomsmen and family members to have corsages and these again were made of silk and dried flowers. All in all we used the best resources for a fall wedding for our decorations and flowers and it cost us just under $400.