Venue flowers – Spring decor for a mantlepiece
If you’re a flower grower, Spring is a time of huge excitement as you watch the flowers, trees and shrubs spring back into life. To celebrate the loveliest ingredients of the moment (in spite of the incessant rain) I teamed up last week with Flowers by Meg at Roots and together we created a floral mantle to get back into our creative flow with wedding flowers after the long hibernation of winter.
Piling my car high with boxes of vases and with buckets of flowers and foliage, I made my way over from Birmingham to Meg’s farm on the edge of Worcester. Driving down the track from the gate to her farmhouse always gets my scissor fingers itching as it’s flanked by mature shrubs waving all sorts of lovely textures and colours at me! It’s a delight to have such an abundance just beyond the back door to plunder to inspire creativity. From these we cut tall stems of lime green-flowered viburnum opulus to provide a fabulous undulating backbone for our mantle and to create structure and negative space in this meadowy celebration of Spring. We combined them with the elegant and more delicate foliages of a smaller leafed cotoneaster (don’t ask me to name it – it was accidentally gifted to me by a passing bird….) and a white-flowered spirea on arching stems which I’d cut from my own garden.
Read more and find out why we think floral mantles are the bees knees.
Why dress a fireplace with flowers for your wedding or event?
Fireplaces naturally form a major architectural focal point in any room and this makes them great candidates to support a flowery installation with a real wow factor.
As they often have sturdy and beautiful surrounds, the mantlepiece surface provides a fantastic elevated surface to raise wedding or event flowers close to eye level, and this adds colour and interest at height in the overview of a room – something that’s particularly helpful in high-ceilinged spaces. You may be fortunate enough to find that the fireplace has an overmantel mirror and if this is the case, your flowers will be reflected back into the room, appearing to double their volume at no extra cost!
But in my opinion, the best reason of all for decorating a mantlepiece is that it places your flowers at the perfect height for your guests to bury their noses in the petals and to enjoy their perfumes up close.
A practical and cost-effective way to use your budget for wedding flowers
Investing in larger flower installations or arrangements helps to deliver impact for your event as they bring a real ‘wow’ factor to a space. They are eye-catching in a way that can’t be replicated by lots of small arrangements dotted through a large room so can be a better way to use your event flowers budget. Small flower arrangements can get lost from view amidst the glassware, candles etc on tables, especially when guests are all seated and the multiples required for a room full of tables mean that their cost can quickly add up. Part of the cost of multiple smaller pieces is not so much in the flowers used to create them, but in the vessels required to hold them, the floristry time to create them and the logistical time needed to pack (and unpack) smaller items individually and to set them up in place around the venue.
There are also practical advantages in flowering larger features, rather than the tables, if you are planning to serve food in sharing platters. Amidst wine glasses, bottles, etc, you’ll need plenty of free space for serving plates and sometimes the placement of flower arrangements can be tricky in this situation (unless they’re in containers with a small footprint that can easily be moved around).
Larger flower installations can be a really effective way to use your budget and to create something that’s memorable for both you and your guests. Why not be brave and embrace going big?!
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