I was so lucky to be able to make flowers for Anna & Andrew’s beautiful wedding this May at the Foundry, in Long Island City, NY. The Foundry was such a fun venue to work at, and the industrial environment was a great contrast to the lush flowers. The flowers for Anna’s wedding were supposed to feel “abundant”, and abundant they were! We were lucky enough to be working in peak peony season and boy was it fun. Some of these blooms were the size of my head.
Anna put so much thought into the details at her wedding, and there were lots. This was a wonderful example of a wedding where the couple incorporated things that were important to them in the decor at their wedding without creating an environment that felt too contrived.
I owe a huge thank you to all of the people that made this wedding possible. This was my first wedding in NYC, and I can tell you that I missed the wide streets of SLC, and the ability to just pull my van up to the front door of my studio to load up. Special thanks to Liza Lubell for helping out and letting me rent some space in her studio, and to Amy Merrick for helping me day-of. Amy is to credit for putting together those beautiful chair-back arrangements together for the bride and groom. Also, thanks to David, Aly, and other David for all their help hauling that 171 feet of centerpiece in all its shapes and forms around for me for three days.
Its a crazy thing to think about all the places a flower goes before it ends up at a wedding. It is such a personal thing, and obviously, flowers at weddings are beautiful otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. But when you break it down to show the whole process, it becomes a bit less glamorous.
The flowers are cut from the field, where they go into sleeves, then into buckets. Then they go into a van to the market, or are wrapped up in paper and then boxes and shipped by plane and then van to the wholesalers. At the wholesalers they are unpackaged and put in buckets again. From the wholesaler they are often boxed up again and shipped to actual floral designers in more paper. We then un-box them, and bag the paper, which then will go to a dumpster, then in a truck, to a landfill. The flowers are again put into buckets by designers. Then we spend days taking them out of buckets and putting them into vases. Then we put the vases in boxes, the boxes into vans, and take the to the venue. They come out of the boxes, are put on the tables. At the end of the night….sadly, they are usually ripped apart and often thrown away. The bags of flowers are then loaded into a van and dumped into a dumpster…..where they go in another truck to a landfill. What a cycle…right?
Fortunately I was able to buy a lot of these peonies locally, which cut out….only about 1/3 of that ridiculous process. The floral industry is a not friendly to the earth. Ironic, isn’t it? Hopefully I havent ruined the magic, and you can still find beauty in this 171 feet of centerpiece. It was beautiful, and I would love to do something like this again….even with all of the transporting, packaging, and unpacking.
