The Wedding that wasn't.

       So, sometimes in life things don't work out the way we plan.  Sometimes the most elaborate plans fall apart at the last moment.  Sometimes, that's a really good thing.  You could even say, a blessing.
       Last Saturday we were supposed to be delivering the flowers for a wedding in Anacortes.  The bride, a lovely woman glowing with excitement, had come in to the shop a couple of months prior to look through our albums and pick out her bouquets.  The bouquets she like best, she told me, were the messy-looking, wild bouquets.  Full of ferns, grasses, twigs and wildflowers.   Hmmm.... messy I can do.  As a matter of fact, I believe that messy, wildflower bouquets are what I do best.  We hit it off right away. 
      Fast forward to the Friday before the wedding date.  The mother of the bride calls to let me know the wedding has been called off.  She doesn't go into details.  She doesn't need to, that part isn't any of my business.  But what to do about the floral bouquets.
      We have a pretty strict policy about when we will accept cancellations, and up until what point the deposit becomes non-refundable.  In this case, one week before the wedding, the flowers have already been pre-ordered from half a dozen different suppliers.  They are on the way from different parts of the world.  Too late to back out now.  Mom understood the situation from a business stand point, but really....what do to with all those flowers? 
      I suggested re purposing them into different bouquets.  Just as beautiful, still messy and wild, but more the type of bouquets that the bride could gift to friends or family that had been particularly helpful during this trying time.  Mom decided that they could also gift some of the bouquets to friends who had given wedding gifts that were not returnable, another great idea. 
       I feel so badly for this young woman to have to go through such a difficult time when she had been planning the most special day of her life.  But I also know that whatever it was that came up, would have come up eventually.  Next month or next year or even a couple of years down the road when there were children involved in the mix.  It's so much easier to call off a wedding at the last minute, avoiding all that future heartache, than to wait and wonder if you should have.  She's very brave and I wish her all the best for her future happiness.
     Below are pictures of some of the bouquets that she gifted to her friends and family.

From the Garden to the Flower shop

One of my wire services hosts a monthly competition, this month the theme for the Cooler Competition (as it is called) was to pull some type of foliage from outside the flower shop and use it in a bouquet.  It could be from anywhere outside.  The flower garden down the street, the tree outside the window, where ever.  I am very fortunate that I have a plethora of choices when it comes to both foliage and flowers when I walk outside my door.

 Everything in the bouquet shown above was plucked, trimmed, yanked or cut from the flower garden in front of the shop, the window boxes on my sidewalk, the field across the street, or the woods next door. 

It was like a treasure hunt.  I found fall blooming crocus in the flower bed, along with heather, the last buddelia of the season, spanish lavender, crocisima pods, and clematis pods.  The abandoned field across the street yielded wild sweet peas, oregano (I know, who would have guessed), a few stems of wild grasses  and black berries (no surprise there), the flower pots had geraniums and petunias.  From the overgrown woods in the lot next door I found what looks like pink yarrow but I know that it is not and some kind of lovely mauve flower that I have no name for.  And of course, more black berries.  I had to fight the spiders for the blackberries but I won that battle.