Sustainable Wedding Flowers

/

It’s been exciting to see more and more couples seeking out local flowers for their wedding, asking about sustainable options, and trying to keep their wedding low-waste. When my clients’ values line up with my business values, it feels great for everyone!

So what are “sustainable wedding flowers”? The word “sustainable” is now used so often that it can lose its meaning, but I still find it useful. I think of sustainability as a continuum, where I’m always striving to do better while realizing that perfection isn’t possible. Making sustainable choices means continuing to learn, understanding the long-term costs of a cheap or environmentally unfriendly option, and trying to choose a better way forward.

Some of the choices I’ve made so far:

  • Using only local flowers, typically the flowers I grow, when designing weddings.

  • Growing as many flowers as I can from seed instead of buying plugs or plants.

  • Paying fair wages to employees.

  • Avoiding all pesticides and non-organic chemicals in the garden and the soil.

  • Rarely using postharvest additives in flower buckets.

  • Never using floral foam.

  • Offering retrieval services with full-design weddings, meaning that I return the next morning to pick up all rental containers, installations and leftover flowers, which I then compost or dry. Even the water in vases gets reused to water plants.

  • Packaging personal wedding flowers with recyclable (and often recycled) brown paper and cardboard boxes.

  • Avoiding single-use plastics.

  • Stocking an inventory of rental vases and containers that I clean, store, and reuse again and again for weddings.

 

Seed to vase

We grow, harvest and design our flowers on one small piece of land, which means minimal transport costs until your wedding day.

 

A vanload of color

Everything is loaded up in vases or in buckets with water. We use a tarp to catch debris while designing on-site and bring it back to compost.

No trash!

We use sturdy reusable racks and buckets to bring flowers to your venue, so we aren’t creating trash during setup, and your flowers and vases are safe during transport.

We clean up, too

Next-day retrieval means we pick up all rental vases and flowers for composting – and we get to see how much fun you had.

 

Minimal packaging

We use recycled brown paper to package bouquets, and we design pocket boutonnieres on a base of paperboard.

 

Drying for later

After an event, we’ll often save flowers or petals for drying. These peony petals could become flower confetti for a future event.