Fresh Christmas Trees

By Cindy | Corporate Flowers

At Pure Botanics we only use the best, and when it comes to fresh Christmas trees that’s the Nordman.

Nordman Christmas trees are fantastic, they have those lovely thick branches with a deep glossy green colour. Another reason we like these trees is they don’t loose their needles as quickly as other inferior trees, this is crucial for all our customers.

We have installed and decorated many Nordman trees this year in hotels and offices ranging from 8ft to 12ft high. You can see me here up the ladder decorating a 12ft tree. It always seems to be me up the ladder, never at the bottom holding on!

Once lit and adorned with decorations these trees look and smell fantastic.

Here you can see a close up photo of a tree decorated with stunning silver and white baubles.

The thing everybody hates about Christmas trees is taking them down. But don’t worry as part of our service we will strip the tree of decorations and remove it for you.

All of the trees are sent for recycling so that nothing’s wasted.

Individual Bud Vases to Create Your Wedding Centrepieces

By Cindy | Wedding Flowers

I’ve just been reading a recent article in ‘Martha Stewart Weddings’ where she talks about using little bunches and single stems of flowers in small individual vases.

It just reminded me of a recent wedding where we did exactly that!

Vintage Wedding Theme

It was for Julia and Leighton who planned a vintage themed wedding. They chose very natural old fashioned flowers to fit with their theme including cream ‘Vendela’ roses, white ranunculus, cream freesias, cream snap dragons, daisies and silver eucalyptus foliage. Julia wanted a very random look to her table decorations so she collected small vintage glass vases and jam jars on the run up to her wedding.

We then placed little bunches and single stems of all the different flowers into the vases and jam jars. They were then placed all along the centre of each of the long tables. I must admit it looked fantastic, these individual arrangements added interest and variety to the table. They were nestled in between the old fashioned decorative crockery that the couple had hired especially to fit in with their vintage theme.

Finding Inspiration

A lot of wedding flower magazines feature table decorations that are huge arrangements packed full of flowers. These are wonderful arrangements that we also work on at times but they are certainly not for everyone. For a start you have to have a large budget if you’re thinking of going down this road. But also you have to think carefully about what you want.

At Pure Botanics we follow the trends and fashions closely but we always emphasise the fact that we produce wedding flowers for ‘real brides’ with real budgets. We also like designing arrangements specifically for couples, that way you get exactly what you want and often something that people haven’t seen before. This is guaranteed to give you the wow factor whatever size the arrangement is.

A good florist should always be able to develop ideas and come up with designs to fit with the theme and style of a wedding.

Christmas Garlands

By Cindy | Corporate Flowers

Christmas garlands are always very popular with our hotel clients. They provide the perfect decoration for areas like reception as you can see in this photo. The great thing about garlands is they can be placed so that they don’t clutter up the reception desk for the staff and guests but look highly decorative as people enter the hotel.

This year we’ve been perfecting our bow making skills adding personalised ribbons for each of our clients.

The skill of garland making is positioning all of the decorations so that can be seen to give the maximum impact. I love the hanging baubles and stars in this garland the silver and white colour theme work perfectly in front of the dark wood.

Christmas Decorations for Hotels and Offices

By Cindy | Corporate Flowers

The start of December means only one thing…Christmas is coming!  I hope that you’re feeling as excited as I am.  I have spent the last week preparing and installing a range of Christmas trees and festive decorations for corporate clients.  I deliver fully decorated trees to offices and hotels.

This year gold has been a popular colour to decorate trees among my clients.  This is also one of my favourites.  This colour is suitable for all kinds of venues from elegant country houses to modern offices.  I have also used silver themes and turquoise/purple themes with other clients.

One of the reasons that customers like our Christmas service is that it’s hassle-free.  We install and remove decorations with the minimum of fuss and then we store them throughout the year at our storage facility. Nothing could be easier!

This year we sourced some lovely hand-crafted reindeer, made from willow.  You can see these in the photo above before they were installed. These were an instance hit with visitors to the hotel where they were installed.

We have also created a unique range of Christmas decorations in decorative glass vases (as can be seen below).  These can look particularly stylish and are not available anywhere else.

What Shape or Style of Bridal Bouquet is Currently in Fashion?

By Cindy | Wedding Flowers

Now this is always a difficult question as when choosing a bridal bouquet lots of things have to be considered. For example; the style of bouquet with your flower choices, ease of handling i.e. do you feel comfortable holding it and choosing a bouquet that fits with the style and design of the wedding dress. Although fashion can have an effect on your final bouquet choice, it shouldn’t dictate your choice as the factors above are far more important.

How to Choose Your Bouquet

Only yesterday I was chatting to Joanne about her choice of wedding bouquet and the only problem Joanne had was she liked everything and her wedding gown did not dictate one shape of bouquet to another.

However in her quest to narrow down her options, she’d referred to her mothers wedding photo’s of over 30 years and had discovered that her mum held a shower (teardrop) bouquet. Her question to me was are they a popular choice or are they old fashioned?

What’s In Fashion?

This is a popular topic and shower (or teardrop) bouquets, as seen here, have recently come back in fashion. This news pleased Joanne as I think she was slightly nervous about her choice, although she loved it. Some of you may remember that Lady Diana had a huge shower bouquet at her wedding to Prince Charles. This caused an almost immediate trend for large shower bouquets in the 80’s.

This was then replaced in the years following it for a craze for the more relaxed, natural style hand tied posy, which has stayed in fashion for many years.

But just recently we have seen an increase in popularity for the shower bouquet again, and it is certainly now back in fashion. Although we have created many hand tied posies this year we have also made more shower bouquets than ever, so yes they are back.

When Not to Have a Shower Bouquet

The only time I recommend that brides don’t have a shower bouquet is when they have detailing at the front of their dress that may be covered by a shower bouquet. Or if they have a sash or rushed effect to their dress that crosses at an angle across the front of their gown. A shower bouquet would confuse the line of this dress drawing the eye down instead of across as it was intended.

Get Advice

So fashion may play a part in your bouquet choice but don’t let it be the only decision, it’s important to get advice of how it fits in with the design of your dress and the style of your flowers.

As ‘Stargazer’ lilies and the colour pink are two of Joanne’s favourite choices she has chosen a stunning shower bouquet of the lilies, pale pink roses and ivory freesias. All arranged with stunning delicate dark green ruscus leaves and diamante clusters. Now don’t panic if you are worried about the pollen on her dress, all lily pollen is removed by us before we produce this type of bouquet!

Here are some more photos of our bridal bouquets.

Wedding with Velvet Red Roses and Calla Lilies

By Cindy | Wedding Flowers

Oh I am so looking forward to working on Hayley and David’s wedding flowers next week.

They have chosen one of my favourite roses, the deep velvety red rose ‘Black Baccara’. This rose is just divine as it has the appearance of silky rich velvet.

You can see in this photo from a previous wedding, how we have teamed the rose up with the gorgeous deepest red calla lily with the fantastic name of ‘hot chocolate’.

When I recently placed their flower order I had to check with my wholesaler that I hadn’t dreamt up that name, but he assured me it is its name, perfect.

Colour Combinations

These two flowers work beautifully together as their colours are so close. In the past we have teamed them up with the beautiful ivory ‘Akito’ roses and cute ivory ‘Albino’ mini gerberas.

The table arrangements will also feature textured hanging deep red amaranthus, red hypericum berries and white Singapore orchids. Wonderful, it should all look very rich and textured.

Deep red and ivory make an excellent combination as the ivory really helps to lift the deep red, it can look a little bit too dark on it’s own.

Bouquet Flowers

Hayley has chosen the very fashionable shaped shower bouquet of calla lilies, roses and gerberas. Her bridesmaids, who are wearing the deep red, will have hand tied posies of ivory roses and gerberas. This will make the flowers stand out against the deep colour of their dresses.

David will be wearing a deep red calla lily buttonhole, similar to the one seen here, whilst the other gent’s will have a rose buttonhole made from the stunning ‘Black Baccara’ rose. To coordinate with the bridesmaids all of the mums and close female family members will have an ivory rose buttonhole.

It’s all going to look splendid, they have chosen a very appropriate colour theme for a November wedding.

Autumn Wedding Flowers

By Cindy | Wedding Flowers

I just wanted to show you a little peek at this wonderful wedding we have recently completed. I adored the stunning rich autumnal colour theme that this couple choose – which allowed me to create some lovely autumn wedding flowers.

October has become a really popular time of year for weddings, partly due to the fact that we do get some of those beautiful sunny fresh days. It’s not always the case that brides stick to the autumn colour theme when getting married in September/October but if they do it can work really well.

The Colour Theme

Right from the onset of her wedding planning, Amy had her heart set on using the fabulous burnt orange colour theme for her wedding flowers. After some deliberation, she chose to tie it in with lime green. This fitted in so well as her bridesmaids were dressed in a beautiful emerald green. Adding another colour such as red, yellow, pink or lime green to orange can really set it off.

The bride also wanted to incorporate autumn foliages into all of her church and reception decorations. We worked beautiful orange and red oak leaves in with deep green foliage to give it a look of the season. These were placed in her pedestal arrangements, top table centrepiece and her tall table arrangements. We also scattered large orange leaves, orange rose petals and tiny crab apples in-between candles on the church windowsills.

Venue Decorations

I really love the tall table arrangement design she chose and we have certainly produced many variations of this design over the years. For Amy we placed the beautiful ‘Cherry Brandy’ rose inside the vases and an arrangement of roses, gerberas and daisies on the top with fabulous mango calla lilies falling down the vases. They looked stunning in the beautiful Mansion at Wroxall Abbey. Tall arrangements work particularly well in here because of the tall ceilings and large ceiling to floor windows, which look out onto the terrace.

To finish off the table arrangements we placed the vase on a circular mirror surrounded by tea lights in glass holders. We then scattered a large amount of rose petals around the base. The beautiful orange rose petals looked fabulous on the white linen tablecloths. Scattered petals also kept in with that look of fallen autumn leaves.

Autumn Wedding Flowers for the Bride

For the bride we created a stunning hand tied posy of mango calla lilies, ‘Cherry Brandy’ roses and green hypericum berries. We also placed delicate twigs and deep green ruscus into the bouquet. Her bridesmaids held smaller versions without the calla lilies and twigs and her flower girl had a beautiful basket of orange rose petals.

If you are planning an autumn themed wedding these wonderful flower choices might be worth considering.