Weddingbee Blog

I’ll get this out of the way: it is really sad that there was a volcanic eruption and ash it bad for the lungs and not good for air travel. No one is happy that there is ash-air abound. I am sorry if you are stuck in ash-land. No, not Ashland, Oregon where the Shakespeare Festival is held (thanks, elementary school!), but ash-land. Note hyphen.

So, back to being selfish.

Ash is stopping flights and that’s making it hard to get certain flowers. Why do I know this? It’s because I’m still going through post-wedding-depression and keep up with this stuff even after over 2 years of being married. Mr. GB forgives me, or rather, doesn’t know I’m still doing this and would probably be horrified if he knew. Thankfully, he doesn’t read my blog because he says I’m horribly cryptic and when I was traveling Europe with my landlord before we were dating, he read it and felt miserable. I’m glad I cut that off early. This is also why I can tell you really embarrassing stories about him. Because he doesn’t know.

When I build my time machine, I’m going to go back in time and take this bouquet from Mrs. Cowboy Boot and then go further back in time to my wedding. It’s a complicated plan, but it just might work…

So what do you do when your dream flowers are unavailable?

You do what I did and just let it go. My favorite flowers are dahlias, peonies, and ranunculus. Basically, I like petals and I dislike seeing the… pollen parts. My floral terminology is WIN. I got married in October. Put those together and you have about as sad a face, but not quite, as you get with volcanic ash.

One thing I did, and sometimes this wasn’t the best thing… but we won’t get into that, is trust my vendors completely. When talking to my floral designer, and just sending her a couple of photos and really very little direction, I let her know that I was fully aware that my favorites were unavailable in October. I didn’t push it, I figured that if she could magically make them appear, she would, so it was fine if she couldn’t. I’d just check her off of my list of potential emergency magicians. Granted, I had the most awesome floral designer on the planet (not biased at all) but I generally feel that if you’re hiring someone, you must love what they have done and you’re not blindly picking people out of the phone book.

I’m still in awe of my bouquet and how in comparison, I look like crap. No really, that thing outshone me 100 times over.

The first time I saw my bouquet it was sitting in a plastic bucket, on the ground, outside the back door of the cottage. Talk about presentation. You know if you see your bouquet in such a flattering way and you still love it, it’s perfect and going to be so much more awesome when it’s not in a crappy bucket.

Moral of this story: don’t worry if your flowers are not going to be available - whether that be due to poor timing (geez, you SHOULD have planned your wedding around seasonal blooms!!!) or flight-stopping-ash. Have a little faith, things will be OK. And really, you should be worrying about other things - like boob slippage and falling on your face at a roller skating rink one week before the wedding and being covered in bruises.

How much—or little—direction are you giving your floral designer?