Wedding Blog

Name the musical! (image)

As far as flowers go, I knew this was a place where we’d splurge (i.e. likely go over what we budgeted even after budgeting a larger percentage of our budget than typical… we might as well call it what it is!). I acknowledge the great irony that I am totally averse to an expensive dress because I’ll only wear it about 6 hours, but I am really excited about lots of pretty floral design that, after the evening, pretty much ends up in the circular wedding file.

I think this love of flowers and my desire to have beautiful floral design at our wedding comes from my parents. My mom swears she hates all design, decorating, and general crafty type things—except flowers and making bows (yes, she makes a killer bow!). Although I love design of all kinds (yes, I’m marrying a designer) I inherited some of my mom’s, shall we say, aesthetic minimalism. I don’t like fussy or super-feminine anything, and I always have a healthy “form-is-function” subtext running in my mind when I think about putting things together.

Even growing up in a pretty utilitarian house in regards to decorating and other design arts, my dad’s a photographer and both of my parents love to garden. Growing up, there were always fresh flowers—roses, gardenias, camellias, millions of irises, gladiolas, daffodils—in our house. My dad, a photographer, fills albums (and now screensavers slideshows and computer wallpaper) with photos of the flowers that he and my mom have grown. My mom’s been known to stop on the side of the interstate to dig up a particular wildflower she likes for her perennial bed, and when she came to visit here, the most notable thing she enjoyed was the delphinium growing weed-like around the city (no, she didn’t harvest it… but I think she regrets that!).

So, I guess flowers have always held a bit of a special place for us as a family. As I agonized over florists (seriously, I care more about the flowers than the cake, my dress, and the food!), Mr. Snow sometimes looked at me like I was nuts. While almost all of our other decisions have been made by consensus (usually me coming up with some wacky idea and Mr. Snow saying, “Um…do we really need that?” or “How does that help unify the aesthetic we’re going for?”) he said he was totally indifferent toward the flowers, other than he really liked moss. Otherwise, flowers were totally my decision.

So, last night, we chose our florist. I’ll post more about that decision later, but I am really really happy about our decision.

If flowers are really important to you, how did you figure out what percentage of your budget you’d use for them?