Wedding Wednesday: The Flowers

Flowers are driving me crazy. I thought I had it all fixed and now I'm changing my mind on everything! Floristry "La Flor" from Manresa will be our flowers provider for our big day. My mom and I visited the place and spend more than two hours discussing the whole decoration with the floristry owner, charming Cristina. There's A LOT to decide about the flowers: the ceremony venue, the banquet venue, the bridesmaids bouquets and, of course, the bride's bouquet, among other details. But before talking about this, let me show you how nice that floristry is!

So cute, huh? Now back to my wedding! I was very sure of the flowers I wanted for decoration and specially for my bouquet, my all time favorite: white and pink PEONIES. I like compact, abundant bouquets, and peonies have exactly that effect. We sat down with Cristina to talk about the whole thing, and I exposed my idea right away. The reply from Cristina left me totally speechless: Peonies are spring flowers, and they are not available in October. OH-MY-GOD! I had no idea! Away went my dream bouquet!!! She even called her peonies provider to make sure, but he said I better forget about it, because all I could get in October are peonies from the middle-east, and the quality is not assured {besides being super pricey to fly in flowers from there, of course!} 

My mom holding a white peonies bouquet

So I had to reconsider my wedding from scratch, and we spent some time looking at several alternatives, until we came up with Gypsophila Paniculata, a tiny white flower, which both my mom and Cristina seemed to love. We settled on using this flower for the whole thing (ceremony + reception), but somehow my "white and pink wedding", which is what J and I had pictured all along, turned into a white wedding only. A wedding with Paniculata is super elegant and pretty, but my favorite color is pink, and it's totally gone!

When back to Hong Kong, I explained everything to J and we started considering other options. Then I thought about carnations. They are available all year-round, have the perfect shade of white and baby pink, and they are practically the same size as peonies. Everything seems perfect! How come Cristina never mentioned about it when considering alternatives for the peonies? She might have thought carnations are not elegant enough, because they are relatively cheap, and a very popular flower in Spain, for Southern Spain is the biggest producer of carnations in Europe. One thing I'm totally in love about carnations is they have this compact and abundant style I said I like so much!

Our idea is for the whole decoration to be set up in perfect round, thick arrangements. And... carnations seem way more fit for this purpose than Paniculata! Another idea we had was placing three white candles in the middle of the round flower centerpiece for the reception as below:

Then J told me using three white candles is a very bad omen in the Chinese culture, because 3 candles are used to pray to God, and white is the color of death, so go figure... We have to change the whole design. But never mind, we'll figure it out. 

The most important now is to decide between Paniculata and Carnations... What do you dear readers think about it? I could use some advice! :)

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