Wedding flowers

Well we did it.  My partner of the last 12 years or so and I got married.  We had a small intimate ceremony in the backyard and had 20 friends and family present (less than I would have liked, but we had to be able to squeeze everyone in).  As is often true for me, I ended up doing a lot at the last minute (or not doing it at all).  I've never made a floral wrist corsage before and figured out how to make one at 6 am the morning of the ceremony.  I like how it turned out! I had cut a bunch of things that have a tendency to droop if not well hydrated (hello basil!) and had to cut a lot of the shrubs around the edges of our lawn area to allow more chairs to fit.  It is foliage that I use often in arrangements so I striped the lower leaves and stuck the stems in buckets for potential use later.  I'm SO GLAD I did this!  
The morning of the ceremony we were racing around preparing our space for a possible switch to indoors because it had been drizzling since 5 am and everything was wet.  Our house was really not going to work with that many people all in one spot but it seemed it might have to.  I'm very happy that the drizzle stopped around 10:30 (people started to coming over at 10).  Since I had just hopped in the shower at 9:40 and wanted to put a little bit of effort into how I looked.  I was delighted when one of my dear old friends took on making the spread of empty vases and buckets of foliage and flowers into something presentable for me.  Another friend brought a gorgeous flower crown and boutonierre so my beloved and I had matching florals to wear.  While I primped the flower power duo turned a hodge podge of stems into an amazing array of flower art.  Truly stunning!  
My point of writing this blog post isn't to brag about how great the flowers at my wedding were.  It's to share the power of foliage!  Don't discount shrubs when you are trying to choose stems for inspiring your designs.  You'll see in the photos that the foliage ties everything together and really works to create a unified design.  I have a good size collection of oh flora vessels (a guilty pleasure - they are quite an indulgence!) and that also helped create visual coherence.  Overall I was blown away by the talents of my two friends (neither of whom are professional designers but I swear they both could be!) and how well my beloved flowers and FOLIAGE!!! showed up for me.  In fact, I didn't cut very many flowers because my beds aren't very abundant right now.  I had some dried hydrangea stems and several other stems of dry material and they also helped fill out the designs.  Once again, key point here is DON'T FORGET THE FOLIAGE! and USE YOUR SHRUBS!  They really came through for me and helped to make it a wonderful and beautiful celebration!