To break away from our traditional blog posts featuring weddings that we do, we’re going to start from the beginning showing you what goes on 3-4 days before the actual wedding day.   The bridal party and their guests that attend weddings get to enjoy the finished products, but do they actually wonder what goes on behind the scenes to create these gorgeous arrangements.  Hopefully this post will give you a snapshot of what’s involved from the florist’s standpoint and why to no surprise that brides underestimate the true costs thats needed to properly make their wedding vision a reality.  The latter part of this post will reveal some images from two weddings that we had back to back this past weekend at the Bella Collina Mansion.

There’s always one thing that’s constant into making a bride’s vision a reality.  That is “simple hard work”.  Above we’re showing you pictures of the flowers as they’re removed from the flower growers’ shipping boxes and hydrated properly to ensure their nourishment for lasting beauty.  On a typical week, the flowers arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday before a weekend wedding.  Each bunch is accounted for, stems are cleaned of foliage and freshly re-cut before being submersed into a re-hydrating water solution.

Some of the flowers that need “coming out” are kept out of the cooler and sometimes actually placed outside so the heat can bring them to their mature state faster.  Hydrangea, roses, and lisianthus are flowers that may need this forced procedure to help stay within the critical time deadlines for the wedding day.   Other flowers as outlined in the wedding arrangements schedule are placed in the cooler in strategic positions to allow easy access before they’re used for the arrangements construction.   I’m going to let you in on a little secret… Nothing ever goes as planned. No matter how much time and energy we spend on making sure everything goes just as we’d like, something keeps us on our toes every week. Maybe the roses we ordered in aren’t as big of heads as we’d like, or a crop comes in looking not as great as usual, we have to improvise and adjust almost every week due to the changing product we work with. Sometimes this means spending a little more than we budgeted on our end to ensure our product meets our high standards. We’ve learned to be flexible with this process, as there may be something unplanned that comes up and needs quick and immediate action to ensure our end-product is to our standards.

One thing that’s constant here at Always & Forever Florist is team work.  When weekend weddings are scheduled, the employees work hard as a team all week to ensure that your wedding visions come to life.  From the beginning flower prep stages right up to the day of delivery, there’s a steady flow attained that guarantees that your wedding turns out just as you envisioned.  Below we’ve included some pictures from the two Bella Collina weddings we delivered this past weekend.  We hope you enjoy the pics and hopefully you’ll consider us for YOUR future wedding, no matter where it’s held.