Themed wedding flowers by a seasonal florist

Here at Common Farm Flowers we love to do ALL kinds of wedding flowers: from working with the budget bride making DIY posies with buckets of flowers we supply, to clients who ask us to design what I call the Full Fragonard, a luxurious wedding flowers scheme indulging flights of fancy and working hard to make the bride's dreams come true.

Often, when we plan to install a huge, luxurious scheme, we make a good, but still rough plan, and give the bride a budget, but it's understood that we'll have to play the design aspect a little by ear.

The quantity of flowers is agreed, the number of arrangements, but often the bar isn't quite where they think it'll be, or the dancefloor looks a bit bare on the day, or the entrance to the marquee doesn't quite reach the hedge as we thought it would, and so we have to be ready to work on the hoof a little, and use our creative heads as we install the wedding itself.

This particular wedding was one such. The bride and groom came to see us with mood boards of their ideas and explained that they weren't having a traditional sit down dinner, but that their large, L shaped marquee, would be laid out like a 1930s Kenyan safari tent, with sofas, and campaign chairs, and Turkish rugs, and all sorts of props and styling. It looked to me as though they were trying to create a set out of one my all time favourite films, Out of Africa. They would even, they said, be hiring vintage stuffed animals (!!!!!) (old, I hasten to add, original 1930s specimens) to give the marquee a real Out of Africa feel.

Always loving a challenge we agreed a budget and that we would pop up to the marquee on the Thursday before the Saturday wedding to get an idea of the lay out and where there would be space to put the flowers. Until we actually did them we had no definite idea of how many of everything we were going to make, or how much of my (extensive!) vintage vase collection would be used. All I knew was that the client had essentially bought the contents of my three and a half acre cutting patch for her exclusive use that weekend, and that we would have a long day, and great fun, deciding what to do with it.

We're a regular team of three florists here at Common Farm, but for this wedding I enlisted the extra help of my friend flower essence queen Saskia, who is used to using her imagination, and loves a creative challenge, and so on the Thursday evening we popped up to see the marquee taking shape and then on Friday, with a whole barn full of flowers to choose from, we set to.

We always try and make most of the floristry here at the farm and then transport it with buckets of spares to the venue. Doing flowers at a venue makes such a mess. Also it was hot weather, so it was better to make it all in our cool barn and then transport and install on the Saturday morning.

What do you think?