Over the last few years, I’ve created beautiful farm fresh bouquet for my wedding, as well as other floral bouquets for countless special occasions. I find them all to be beautiful and fitting for the occasion. Just as beautiful is the growth of learning growing and arranging fresh-cut flowers.
Fresh Peony Wedding Bouquet- 2019
With flower farming, my start was in picking peonies from my mom’s rows of flowers in her backyard. I would make arrangements here and there, but my obsession began when I was getting married and was truly a DIY bride.
I had my own bouquet already made from faux peonies and small iris. It was within the last two weeks, I changed my mind, picked my peonies, preserved them in the refrigerator, unwrapped them and arranged them the day before my wedding. I loved peonies and fresh flowers so much. It was worth it to create a farm fresh bouquet. It truly was.
My wedding bouquet was a simple collection of white, light pink, and dark peonies. Karl Rosenfield. Sarah Bernhardt. Festiva Maxima. The pinks and the whites matched my white and blue wedding dress, as well as contributed to the floral peony theme of the wedding.
Rhododendron Anniversary Bouquet- 2020
Almost a year after our wedding, we did anniversary pictures. The season was about a week to two behind schedule. Peonies were not in bloom. But the rhododendron bushes were in full swing.
I’m not sure how rhododendron blooms would work in a long-term arrangement. I think they would go bad after a day. Maybe last two days at the most. With that in mind, I think I will just leave rhododendrons as a beautiful large flowering shrub to signal the beginning of the beautiful summer season.
My farm fresh bouquet consisted of purplish pink rhododendron stems with their green leaves still on the stem. It adds a layer of greenery, which is something that I lacked experience and knowledge in at the time. I don’t know if it’s the rarity of using rhododendrons as a cut flower or just the beauty of the blooms itself, this is one of my favorite bouquets. Excellently beautiful. Exceptionally simple.
Nelen Farm Bouquet- 2020
Also for our anniversary pictures, we chose to get pictures at my husband’s family farm that he grew up visiting, making hay, caring for animals, and helping out. We chose all sorts of locations that encompassed a multitude of farming beauty.
In the barn, we are surrounded by a layer of hay for the barn floor. The Sarah Bernhardt peonies are en masse in a bouquet with some greenery around the bottom edges.
We moved to the pond with the fish, frogs, and eckk- snakes. The dark everlasting hydrangea show off a dark hue of pink. The darkness of the hue compliments the darkness of the darker, cobalt blue of my dress.
Keeping with the farm theme, a farm fresh bouquet with a collection of peonies is placed to adorn my husband’s farm tractor. The bouquet is a mixture of Karl Rosenfield and Sarah Bernhardt peonies with some peony greenery.
Walking through some of the hayfields, we picked some native daisies. Both our favorite colors are yellow. The white petals with the yellow disks coordinate well with the white, blue, and gray colors from our attires, almost even better than any of the peony hues.
I had a bit of fun bringing along my crepe paper flowers of peonies that I created for my wedding centerpieces. The faux peonies are to be in the similar design to Sarah Bernhardt with the multitude of petals.
With both my husband and I coming from farms that made hay, we incorporate the flowers with the hay bales. Now that’s what I call a collaboration between masculine and feminine. I’ll manage the flowers and he can manage the hay. My flowers are the companion to his hay.
A Special Event- 2021
The following year, I created flowers, which was an exercise that really pushed forward my floral arrangement skills. With the passing of my grandmother, I worked on numerous floral arrangements to add to her funeral display.
I did purchase some of the flowers, such as the pink roses and the baby’s breath. For other materials, I used what was available including fern leaves, peony greenery, white smooth-head hydrangea, what was left of the peonies I had from that year, and the white lilies that I planted at least two to three years before this.
What I really learned from this was putting the focal-supporting-filler-greenery recipe into practice. I began with a base of fern and peony leaves. Then I added my focal flowers, whether roses or lilies. I added supporting flowers, which in some cases were either roses or hydrangea. I finished it off with using baby’s breath as filler, which was something I never did before.
A Special Remembrance- 2021
Fresh flowers don’t last forever in their most beautiful form. One random day after work, I decided I was going to re-create the florist’s funeral baskets that were made for my grandmother. My grandmother loved blue, but I just visualize pinks with her too. Sometimes I think that we don’t have one favorite color but color schemes that suit us well.
Of the faux flowers, I used blue hydrangeas, stargazer lilies, white and pink tea roses, blue delphinium, white hydrangea, white baby’s breath, and greenery. What is not scene are some of my crepe paper peony on the other sides. The white basket is the same one that my grandmother’s flowers were in from the florist.
This was a gift to my mom as a remembrance of her mom who shared her love of flowers with both of us.
Our First Year in Our Home- 2021
This also coincides with my first true cut flower garden. Other years, I grew flowers or messed around with growing lots of flowers to cut. This was the year that almost all my blooms were harvest and created into farm fresh bouquets. I wasn’t selling any at this point, although I was trying to. I wasn’t just finding the right market.
With our fall pictures that commemorate our second year together married and our first year in our home, I created bouquets.
My farm fresh flowers
The first bouquet focused on some fall colors. This was created with mainly blooms from my garden, including dark red mum, Indian Summer rudbeckia, red dahlia, peach gladiola, and polar bear zinnia. For greenery, I used stems from pepper plants. I did have one or two store bought pink roses as well, which may not seem like they matched, but between the white, red, and peach, it worked.
The next bouquet was used in the woods pictures. The color scheme focused on pinks, whites, and a little bit of a pop of yellow. I did buy the light pink roses, but I matched it with my own flowers. These included medium pink dahlias, polar bear zinnias, white yarrow (grown naturally), and a few sprays of yellow mum.
The third bouquet was a secondary priority. After creating the first two, I had leftover materials in the polar bear zinnia and the pepper foliage. I combined the two creating my third bouquet.
This was late in the growing season for pictures. I still had a few summertime favorites to use. With a dark blue, I love a bright red. Maybe it is from having these colors be my high school’s colors, but outside of that, the tones of the two colors just match up beautifully. Gladiolas are a beautiful flower that remind me much of elegantly holding a flute in marching band. For the pictures, I hold a red gladiola in the same way I would hold a flute.
My last bouquet for this photography session is a floral bunch of Kelvin Floodgate dahlias. These are a dinner plate variety with the brightest yellow petals. I love yellow, especially this yellow.
Farm Fresh Bouquets for Occasions
Bouquets in special events not only show love between each other, but they are an art that expresses the personality of the recipient and the relationship between the two.
When I created bouquets for my grandmother’s passing, it wasn’t just about providing flowers. It was about my relationship and my mom’s relationship with her and all of us loving flowers. It was about the certain colors that my grandmother loved and represented her. It’s never just above how pretty a flower may be. It is about how the beauty in the flowers brings out the love we have in our relationships with each other.
Farm fresh flowers with dresses
With combining flowers with dresses, yes, one could be without the other, but there’s something with an extra layer of beauty when both are together. The dresses are beautiful by themselves. The flowers are beautiful by themselves. But when paired together, they bring out each other’s beauty.
Flowers with dresses bring out the personality of the person and the setting of the event. As my wedding dress was more of a formal ball gown, so were my flowers regal in being of all peonies. As my anniversary dress was more of my country girl, fun spirit, so were my flowers mix matching my farm girl and young lady personalities with the flowers interacting with barns, ponds, tractors, fields, and hay bales.
Making my own farm fresh bouquet for all sorts events in a three-year span also shows my development in knowledge and skills during those years. I began just putting flowers together, then adding greenery, and then using a whole recipe with a variety of stems. With the growth also shows my high level of passion towards flowers in every year. It is something that is not going to go away any time soon. It’s a love of flowers that will last a lifetime.