A wedding bouquet without flowers

Everytime I have a consultation with a bride I have no idea what they want. Everyone has a favourite flower and that is one of the most exciting things about wedding floristry, no two brides have the same arrangements. There is certainly a fashion for certain flowers and styles and I always try to stick as best as I can to the seasonal stuff but it’s the brides that want something different and unusual that really get me going!

So here comes the bride for a consultation and the first thing she tells me is that she doesn’t like flowers. She does however want a wedding bouquet, so what do we do?

Well, the bride is rather partial to non flowery things like thistles and berries and since she is getting married in Cornwall she wants a bouquet inspired by the Cornish seaside and hedgerows.

Thankfully it’s autumn and most flowers have turned into fruits, berries and seedpods so there is plenty of stuff to choose from. I have a free range on this so I went with the following:

Thistles and sedum, hawthorn and hypericum berries, nigella seedpods, senecio and crocosmia.

I have chosen to arrange it in a tight dome rather then loose as I did really want it to look like a wedding bouquet and not something plucked out of a hedgerow and I think it worked rather well (if I say so myself) because the ingredients are so unusual. The bouquet was finished of with a raw linen ribbon.