Weddingbee Blog

Knowing that real floral centerpieces were out of the question (budget-wise, as well as style-wise), I became EXTREMELY interested in branches…

I was inspired by this curly willow setup, and wanted to incorporate my beloved paper lanterns. So, my genius idea was to have a tall cylinder vase of curly willow with 3 white paper lanterns, and to paint the table number on to one of the lanterns. Genius, right? Right!

Mr. Ramen and I were convinced we were going to do curly willow, until meeting with our now florist, who suggested Victorian birch. We promptly fell in love with it.

That was until I introduced Mr. Ramen to the wonderful world of manzanita. I never in a million years had ever seriously considered manzanita, because however lovely it is, I’m not a frou-frou kind of girl (and let’s face it - all the dripping flowers and hanging candles do have that fancy, “foofy” look…). AND we also don’t have $50-75 x 17 to rent some nekkid branches. I had initially fallen in love with the twisted organic look of the branches, but gave up on it in the name of practicality.

some manzanitas… lovely, but VERY not us.

Some examples of non-froufy manzanitas!  Verrrrrry us!

While researching various options to purchase birch branches (ranging from Nettleton Hollow, to forays into the SF and LA flower markets), I learned that manzanita could actually be affordable. ***GASP*** No, I am not lying to you. You can get some nice lookin’ branches for ~ $7 at the LA flower market (about 12-16″).

I found a bride on Project Wedding who actually was selling manzanita from her brother’s property rather inexpensively. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in contact with her, so I quickly looked into other avenues, and tried to figure out where I could go to in Arizona to cut down some branches. After I learned that this was most likely highly illegal, I began to search for used manzanita online. On Craigslist LA, I found a guy in the Antelope Valley area who had some manzanita trees on his property and wanted to help out brides…

Saul is THE BEST! He was totally willing to work with us, and we got to pick out EXACTLY the size and shape of the branches that we wanted. He even threw in an extra one “just in case”. We spent less than $200 buying 17 centerpieces (all around 36″+), 1 medium sized (~ 40″) tree for our escort card table, and 2 rather large (48″+) trees (to be used to decorate the altar, and later, beside our sweetheart table. After trimming the larger trees, we could probably muster up 2 extra centerpieces. I know - awesome right???? Yes, I died a million happy little deaths of joy.

The back of the minivan FILLED… before we even had loaded my stuff in to bring back home!

The only major issues were transportation and storage. Mr. Ramen and I somehow stuffed all the trees and branches into my parents’ minivan (WITH a ton of my things) when I moved all of my school stuff out of my apt in SoCal, into storage or back to Arizona. We kept the branches in my parents’ house and garage until we were ready to get them ready to be centerpieces.

My living room filled with wedding things… I think my dad wanted to kill me after 2 1/2 months of this…

So keeping in mind that we are expecting about 350 guests, this means we’ll have about 35 tables. So, what about the other 18 tables? Stay tuned for Episode 3! (Hey, all the best things come in trilogies, right?)

Did you have any “surprise happy endings” in your planning journey?

images from Project Wedding

Part 1