When a florist gets married…Rachel Husband of The Rose Shed

In this week’s Wedding Wednesday blog post, I’m thrilled to feature an interview with florist Rachel Husband of The Rose Shed, together with photos of her wedding flowers.

I asked Rachel where she got the inspiration for her designs and which flowers and foliage she used to create them:

‘When planning our wedding, I lost count of the amount of times I was asked whether I would be doing my own wedding flowers. The answer was of course yes… with a little help from my friends and family! Alex and I were married in July at Paintworks in Bristol, an old paint factory with a real urban feel to it. Going against my country bumpkin roots, the antidote to the industrial, city feel of the venue, which we both loved, was to fill it with flowers!

Deciding on a colour scheme for the day was easy. I wanted to go for fresh, summery, warm colours of pink, peach, yellow, coral and ivory…all of my favourite warm tones, which make me feel happy! My mum is an amazing gardener and had grown lots of flowers for the wedding, as having something homegrown was really important to me. My bouquet was filled with homegrown sweet peas, zinnias, the most beautiful coral poppies, cosmos and dahlias alongside my favourite roses such as ‘O’Hara’ for the amazing scent, David Austin ‘Juliet’ roses as I adore the soft peach colour, Sarah Bernhardt peonies and astilbe. I wanted to keep the foliage fresh and green, so used weigela, soft grasses, sedum and rosemary. I finished off my bouquet with stunning peach silk ribbon from Lancaster & Cornish.

The boys all had mixed tied buttonholes of summer flowers such as dahlias, spray roses and roses. I love the fact my Dad walked me down the aisle wearing a coral dahlia that my Mum had grown. It’s these little touches that I will remember…of course it’s all about the flowers!

When it came to decorating the venue, we knew we had to break up the space as it was so huge inside. We had a section of the room for the ceremony, an entrance area with the bar and then the main area for the dinner. We hired in some beautiful silver birch trees to separate the spaces, and this made such great impact to Paintworks, more importantly adding in that much needed green and natural aspect to the building!

We also had a silver birch tree at either side of us during the ceremony. They added height and the perfect green backdrop to saying our vows. I was unsure for a while as how to decorate the ceremony. I really wanted to do something different, so I decided on creating a flower aisle. I used long oasis trays and filled them with snapdragons, eremurus, larkspur and stocks to create height and a meadow-like feel. For the foliage, I used lots of green bell, fountain grass and salal with roses, dahlias and peonies at the base. It really looked like the flowers were growing out of the ground!

We went for long tables for the reception, so filled these with lots of clusters of glass bottles, which my Mum kindly helped me fill and did a very professional job! Alongside simple, low glass vases filled with stocks, peonies, sweet peas, roses, daisies, green bell and zinnias, I wanted to add lots of colour to the tables, but not clutter them up as we had lots of different height candle sticks throughout the tables too.

We had an amazing day and with big thanks to our friends and family for helping set up the day before. In hindsight, I may have slightly taken on too much… especially as I would never advise anyone to DIY their own flowers. But I could never imagine not filling our wedding venue with tonnes of flowers! I suppose it’s slightly different when you’re a florist. But flowering in latex gloves to protect your brand new manicure and finishing off the buttonholes, while the hairdresser is finishing off your hair just adds to the fun!

Thank you so much to Rachel for allowing me to feature her beautiful wedding flowers and to her photographer, Matt Willis. I just adore the flower aisle!

P.S. If you’d like to see more photos of Rachel and her husband Alex’s big day, head over to the Rock My Wedding blog.

(Images : Matt Willis)