The Best Summer Wedding Flowers: Seasonal Style Guide
Image by Jo Bradbury Photography
The Best Summer Wedding Flowers: Seasonal Style Gui
Summer wedding flowers
I don’t like to play favourites, but if I had to choose then summer would be my top season as a wedding florist. It’s a season signified by abundance, colour and variety, and I always think summer wedding flowers are the real cherry-on-top, creme de la creme blooms - particularly the British grown varieties. This is your seasonal style guide to the best florals from the beginning of June to the end of August, so if you’re planning a summer wedding this will be your go-to handbook.
Image Victoria Baker weddings
In-season summer wedding flowers: what’s available
Where spring flowers tend to be softer and more delicate with spongier stems, summer wedding flowers are much more robust. Garden roses are some of my absolute favourite flowers to use (where the design allows) and in the summer you can get the best of British grown ones, the most gorgeous big blousy blooms. Fragrant lavender begins to come through, along with sweet peas and beautiful corn cockle. Huge, fluffy hydrangeas are in season, as well as delphiniums, cosmos and many different types of wildflower. If you love home-grown flowers (like me), this is the best time of year to enjoy them in their prime. Summer is also a great time for tree foliages, though be aware that ever-popular eucalyptus is actually at its worst during the hotter months. It can be bought from Holland year-round but the quality is usually poor and it’s expensive.
I always prefer to work with seasonal blooms, because I believe you’ll get the most incredible wedding flowers from designs that use varieties that are at their best - it’s like choosing the fittest athletes for the team, or the most practiced musicians for the orchestra. If you’re a wildflower lover then it’s the ideal time of year to create organic, abundant meadow style designs; prefer a quaint English garden style? So easy during the summer months. There are so many different styles of wedding flowers we can achieve in the summer, so it’s really the season to let your imagination and vision run wild.
Image by The Crowthers Photo and Film
Summer wedding flower colour palettes
I really believe you can get away with almost any colour palette during the summer months; vibrant, punchy shades work just as well as delicate pastels carried through from spring, and classic white and green offers some lovely flower choices such as jasmine. Generally speaking, florals tend to be more richly coloured during the summer months, but we can just as easily create a design that is breezy and neutral as saturated and indulgent.
Image by Sophie Eleanor Photography
Themes and inspiration for summer wedding florals
One of the most important things to consider for an outdoor summer wedding is what’s already in bloom at your venue. If you’re getting married in the gardens, for example, our design needs to harmonise with the flowers already at home there. We should also carefully consider how we can make the florals we put in place look as though they belong, a ‘just grown here’ style we really love to use. Take a look at my recent blog on English country garden wedding flowers, which will help you visualise all the different ways we can curate your outdoor space.
It’s also important to remember that, much as we would like it to be, the English weather is not always kind to us. I’ll always have a ‘plan B’ in case we need to move your wedding indoors, which will be adapted to your space and every bit as beautiful as its planned outdoor position.
I spend a lot of time sourcing flowers for your wedding design, picking up blooms from multiple places as opposed to just ordering everything in from one grower in Holland. A lot of thought goes into your floral recipe, often working with 2-3 different suppliers for each wedding to get the best quality and price for every stem. I try to use British growers wherever possible, and even have access to specialists such as foliage experts or rose-only suppliers. I’ll never simply turn up at the market that day and see what I can find in your colour scheme; it’s carefully planned and curated, and your Proposal of Dreams will give you as accurate an idea of how your design will actually look on the day as possible.
Images by Emma Ryan Photography
Image by Jo Bradbury Photography
