A Wedding in Tuscany
Brides often say to me ‘you must have had so many flowers at your wedding’. The truth is when you spend your working life making beautiful wedding flowers for other people you don’t want to be a hot mess stressing and sweating on the morning of your own big day. However, not to blow my own trumpet, but my wedding flowers were perfect…because I kept it simple. We had a very small wedding, a party of twenty, we always knew we wanted to get married abroad and have spent many a lovely holiday in Italy. Before we were even engaged we had visited a beautiful spa town in the Tuscan hills and said ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to get married here’, little did we know years later we would be saying our vows in that very spot.
As I say, you don’t want to be stressed and rushing around like a maniac (as I do for every other wedding) so we kept it small and simple. I ordered the flowers from a local florist, a 5 minute walk from the venue and picked them up the day before. I distinctly remember talking to the florist about the varieties I wanted, we had a long conversation (she didn’t speak English and I can just about order a tiramisu in Italian, luckily the language of flowers is universal!) She ordered me all the blooms I needed, an array of pastel roses, wax flower and silver eucalyptus and olive. The hotel we had our wedding reception in were amazing and let me use their beautifully air conditioned events room to prepare everything. I made my bouquets the night before, one less job for the morning!
The ceremony wasn’t until 3pm so I had plenty of time to get all the flowers and myself ready. We had our ceremony in the town’s famous spa and said our vows next to the thermal bath under its intricately hand painted dome. I wanted to make sure everything I made could be reused for the reception. I spent the morning wiring long lush garlands of olive, eucalyptus and roses to adorn the steps at the spa and reused these along the centre of our long dining table, adding more roses and candles before everyone took their seats. Once everything was set up I still had time to drink a bottle of Prosecco in the jacuzzi with my bridesmaids!
I had always pictured myself wearing a floaty, (and of course) floral wedding gown, luckily I found my dream dress online and had it delivered to the florist I worked at the time. I couldn’t wait to open it so my colleagues were the first ones to see it, which I thought quite fitting, them being my flowery pals! We could not have wished for more from our wedding day, it really was the best day of our lives. I enjoyed every aspect from wiring those garlands to walking down the aisle, my dress blowing in the September breeze, sipping aperol spritz with our guests at the spa, sitting down to dinner on the rooftop surrounded by flowers, candles and our nearest and dearest. Not to mention marrying the love of my life (apologies for the vomit inducing slush here, but surely that’s what weddings are all about.)
My advice to brides to be, have the wedding you want and anything you can do to take any stress away - do it, particularly if that includes hiring Barnaby’s Blooms to create the wedding flowers of your dreams! Head over to our Instagram page to see my wedding reel for a bit of floral inspiration.