5 Flowers I Would Ask For: July Edition

As part of an ongoing series on Instagram

For the past several months, I’ve been doing a monthly series focused on my favorite seasonal flowers available during the growing season (here in New York: April through October/November-ish). I haven’t yet done any accompanying blog posts, but let’s start here with July. Yes, we’re halfway through the year, but…better late than never!

While June is technically the beginning of summer, June flowers are still mostly holdouts from spring: fluffy peonies, soft ranunculus, the last of our tulips. July flowers signal that we are really in summer now, and the heat brings hardier blooms in vibrant colors.

Without further ado, here are the flowers I would ask my florist to use if I were getting married in July:

Number 1: Echinacea

Echinacea aka Coneflower

Echinacea- in my top five favorite flowers! When I got married in early June, I desperately wanted these beauties for my bridal bouquet and floral arrangements, but sadly it was just too early. Luckily, I can live vicariously through any of my couples getting married later in the summer!

These beauties are most well-known for the pinkish purple color above, but what makes these so special and versatile is their range of available colors! The sunset tones below are a great example:

Hello gorgeous!!

Number 2: Strawflower

Stawflower aka Xerochrysum

Strawflowers: wow, talk about a range of color. The peachy variety above is definitely my favorite, but these stunners can be found in a ton of shades.

Check out the silvery pink and deep purple varieties below:

The best thing about strawflower? You can hang these babies upside down to dry, and they look nearly identical to how they look when fresh! Then you can use them as permanent decor throughout the year in bud vases or in your winter wreaths.

You can spot some in my wreath from last year here:

Number 3: Chamomile

Chamomile, often mistaken for Feverfew

Chamomile (yes, the same one in your nighttime tea!) is such a sweet sprinkle to add to any July wedding palette. These won’t dry well, but enjoy them while they’re here- dainty, sweet, and with a cottagecore vibe to soften more angular flowers.

If you’re arranging chamomile at home in a vase, take your allergy meds before; these blooms tend to make everyone VERY sneeze-y!

Number 4: Delphinium

Delphinium “Cliveden Beauty”

Oh Delphinium. A true heartstopper.

Most non-florists don’t know this, but blue is a challenging color to integrate into a palette without using artificial dyes! Blue is probably the least commonly-occurring color among flowers, so we take any opportunity to use natural blues we can get. Muscari & tweedia in the spring, delphinium in the summer, and thistle in the fall. Blue hydrangea is available imported most of the year, but can look a bit dated in design work (don’t come for me!!).

Delphinium comes in a ton of shades, including white, purple, and pink. It dries nicely, but where it SHINES after a wedding is as a pressed flower. I pressed a ton of delphinium flowers for the place cards at my wedding, which you can see here:

Forever Photography

Number 5: Garlic Scapes

Twirly, curly garlic scapes (yes, the same ones you eat!)

Garlic scapes are an absolute must for anyone drawn to dynamic shapes, adding angles and curlicues to arrangements and bouquets.

Here’s an arrangement I designed last summer with them and some local tomatoes from the farmers’ market:

If you source these from a pesticide-free grower, you can eat these afterwards! Hot tip: use them in a dirty martini for a local summer twist.

So there you have it- the best flowers July has to offer! If you’re getting married in July, save this post for your wedding planning inspiration.

Number One Tip for Wedding Bouquets That You Probably Don’t Know

If you’re holding a bouquet on your wedding day, it may very well be the first time you’re holding a bouquet of flowers for an extended period of time! Maybe you’ve received flowers for Valentine’s Day or you’ve even put together some grocery store flowers, but there is one really big tip that you may not be aware of, and it’s this:

Keep. Your. Bouquet. In. Water!

That’s right. Anytime you’re not actively holding your bouquet for photos or during the ceremony, it should go right back into the vase of water it was delivered in.

Forever Photography

Why?

By the time these flowers are in your hands on your wedding day, they were cut in a field anywhere from 5 days to 2 weeks ago, possibly shipped across an ocean in a plane, received by your florist, processed (that means trimming excess leaves off, conditioning them for use), and designed prior to your wedding day. (Side note: this is why local flowers are the best! They were probably cut a lot closer to your wedding day and haven’t been traveling excess distances to get to you, making them a lot healthier!)

These poor flowers are TIRED! A good florist will have been keeping them cool, trimming the ends daily to ensure they keep drinking water, and making sure they’re in optimal condition on your wedding day. Often, this means timing out different farm deliveries to ensure all the different varieties of flowers are at peak bloom by the time they’re in your bouquet.

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One of the worst variables for flowers is heat, and human hands are hot. You know how when you hold something for a while, your hands sometimes get warm or sweaty? That body heat can cause your flowers to wilt faster!

If you’re having an outdoor wedding in the summer, this is even more true; body heat combined with environmental heat is a recipe for a wilted wedding bouquet! There’s nothing sadder than designing a gorgeous bouquet for an August bride and then seeing it later in the day, completely wilted from the 90 degree heat.

So what can you do? Well, hopefully your florist delivered your bouquet in a vase with water! If they didn’t, any glass of water will do. Designate a bridesmaid or a friend to grab your blooms anytime they’re laying on a table somewhere and put them back into water. This way, your flowers will look stunning all night AND as an extra bonus-if you’re having your bouquet preserved or dried, it will look even better in its forever form. 

Wandermore Photography (for Stems Brooklyn)

Take this tip with you on your wedding day and enjoy your flowers all night. Happy planning!

How Planning My Own Wedding Made Me a Better Wedding Florist

If you’re planning your own wedding right now (or if you plan to be engaged soon!), you probably are feeling something like excitement mixed with overwhelm mixed with YIKES THAT’S WHAT THAT COSTS?? For many of us, this is the first time we’ve planned a huge event, navigating catering and menus and linens and arrival times and transportation and flowers and dress fittings and and and….

Now, maybe you’re an ultra fancy person who plans lots of large-scale events and this is all old hat for you. If that’s the case- go on with your bad self! You’re amazing! 

But for many couples planning a wedding, this is a whole new world. You might have hosted a dinner party for ten people or had a Bat Mitzvah, so you know there are a lot of logistics that go into hosting. Multiply that for however many guests you’re having and you start to understand exponentially how much more challenging it will be to plan and host a wedding.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved a LOT of the wedding planning process! I got engaged right in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we picked a wedding date nearly two years out in 2022 to have plenty of time to plan. One thing that was invaluable to my now-husband and me was sitting down early on to identify the three most important elements of a wedding- this way, whenever things got overwhelming or we faced decision fatigue, we could return to those three core values and decide whether whatever we were stressing about served those goals. 

For us, we actually both separately picked the exact same three elements: good food/drink, alone time together, and a fun dance party. Those were our tethers. This led us to some of our major decisions like investing in a venue that allowed us to custom create a menu with the in-house chef, including signature cocktails that reflected both of our personalities.

Forever Photography

Deciding on what to do about my wedding florals was a journey. Upon first getting engaged, I had the stellar idea to do my own wedding flowers; thank goodness I had several florist friends ask me if I was insane and realized that yes, I’d probably rather be sipping a glass of bubbly on the morning of my wedding and not building a chuppah. Luckily, I was able to still design the concept for all the wedding elements myself ahead of time, and I hired some floral designer friends to do the actual set up and execution. These friends were true rockstars, because they somehow managed to set up an entire wedding and then transform into wedding guests by the evening!

Forever Photography

From a budget perspective and an Earth perspective, sustainability was huge for us in our wedding planning! Here are a couple sustainable ways we designed our wedding:

1. Sourcing rugs from Facebook marketplace & Craigslist for the aisle.

This look was so important to us, so we spent months sourcing these one at a time. On the day of, they became our wedding aisle, then our venue amazingly flipped them into a dance floor. After the wedding, I sold them as a “complete aisle bundle” to another bride on a local wedding group.. Win win!

2. Pressing flowers for escort cards.

I saved flower heads from work and pressed them in books for months! I did end up sourcing some more pressed flowers from the amazing Lacie at Framed Florals, and the look was so special.

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Bonus: I dried my own flowers at home for individual dried flower bundles at each place setting. 

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3. Drying flowers for confetti.

For two years, I meticulously dried petals from flower heads that came off in processing or normal design, focusing on high saturation flowers like marigold, delphinium, and strawflower. When the wedding got closer, I made paper cones and we gave these out to our guests for tossing at the end of our ceremony.

4. Donating our flowers after our event.

Luckily, our venue, Spillian, had a connection to a local organization, so we didn’t have to do much legwork on this. A couple great folks came during our brunch the day after our wedding, seamlessly rescued whatever flowers still looked beautiful, and took them to local nursing homes and hospitals. This was in the Catskills, but there are fabulous organizations like Bloom Again Brooklyn that do this exact kind of work here!
Our wedding flowers got to have a second life, and that made my heart so happy.

Forever Photography

Of course, there were a lot of less exciting elements to wedding planning, but it’s all part of the ride. We had a gorgeous day surrounded by our closest family and friends, and the most important takeaway was that it felt like us. This is what I always stress to the couples I work with: create something that feels like an organic extension of you two and the love you share, and it’ll always be a day you remember with warmth and love.

Happy planning!