How to plan, order, and design your wedding flowers, understand the cost, and be successful.

DIY wedding flowers are an effective way to save money when creating a pleasing and beautiful wedding aesthetic. But it’s a big job. Furthermore, people don’t understand the cost of flowers and often have unrealistic visions for their budget. While Pinterest and the like are fantastic places to see all that is possible, be careful. That bridal bouquet you just pinned could be made with some of the most expensive, delicate, flowers that may not even be available at the time of your wedding. 

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The Ultimate Guide to Planning and Ordering DIY Wedding Flowers will help you understand “all the things.” Let’s talk wedding flowers and pull this together so that you come to the table with a complete understanding of what you are realistically looking at when buying and designing your own wedding flowers. 

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Let’s successfully plan your DIY wedding flowers within your budget.

You will learn how to:

Create a list of all the places you want flowers.

Understand your vision and be able to share it.

Understand the cost of buying cut flowers.

Know the sources available for buying DIY wedding flowers.

Choose the right flowers for the right place.

Understand the workload of designing DIY flowers and make a week-of plan.

Learn how much do-it-yourself flowers will cost.

Discover some money-saving ideas to repurpose your designs.

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Flexibility will guarantee success when planning your DIY Flowers.

Foremost, think of a mix of blooms when creating your color palette and theme, not specific varieties, or precise flowers.  In the post covid era, nothing is guaranteed. Not with the grower, not with the wholesaler, and not with the florist. Labor shortages, inflation, gas prices, acquiring seeds, and the like have affected buying patterns and availability.

Orders can be made, but substitutions are often delivered because certain flowers are simply unavailable when the time arrives. If you are flexible with a range of colors and flowers to pull off your general look, this won’t be a problem, and you will remain confident that your flowers will be beautiful.

Where to start: Create a list of all the places you want flowers.

Think about all the places you would like flowers at your wedding and create a list. This list is your guiding light to understanding your cost, setting your budget, and creating the week-of workflow. Here is an example:

Personal Flowers
1	Bridal Bouquet
4	Bridesmaid’s Bouquets
6	Boutonnieres (Groom, Groomsmen, Father of the Bride FOB)
3	Corsages (Mother of the groom (MOG), Mother of the Bride (MOB), Grandmother
5	Flower Crown/Halo’s
2	Flower girls (1 Posy & 1 Petals)
Ceremony Flowers
10	Aisle arrangements hanging in jars (100 guests / 2 sides / 10 guests per row = 5 rows per side)
2	Large statement arrangements
Reception	100 Guests (This will help you plan reception tables and chairs)
10	Reception Tables (A lush tablescape with flowers or keeping it simple with bottles and bud vases)
1	Sweetheart table or Head Table
3	Food Tables
8	Cocktail Tables
1	Cake Table- Cake flowers, one arrangement, and loose foliage
Other
1 Bar	Large flower installation – Flower Wall

Have a basic idea of your vision.

When planning your own DIY wedding flowers, you need to have a basic understanding of the look you are going for and be able to share it. This can be done on Pinterest by creating a wedding board (a file) and then having some ‘pins’ (pictures) within that board. You can have boards for each general aspect of your wedding, and it might look something like this:

Wedding Flowers Board Ideas:

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You can also copy and paste pictures into a word or google document, or simply have photos saved in a digital file that you can show and share.

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Example Mood Boards:

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Most importantly, do not plan for your wedding florals to be an exact replica. You want your wedding to be unique to you and the season. Gathering inspiration is just that, inspiration.

Your inspiration is helpful to the plan AND reminds you of your vision. It keeps you focused and on track. There are a million great ideas and rabbit holes to go down and you don’t want to go back to square one a month before the wedding.

Understand the cost of buying DIY flowers.

With the advent of refrigeration and then airplanes, flowers are always available. It’s a worldwide market. Even if you live in the north, where flowers are impossible to grow in the winter without greenhouses, it’s summer somewhere and businesses are growing and shipping flowers.

Here are some basics of flower availability and market demand.

Expensive flowers vs. less expensive flowers.

The key to beautiful garden-like designs is that you have a combination of flowers. This helps with the cost too. If you want a bouquet with solid garden roses, that design will be far more expensive than choosing a collection of flowers with some being less expensive like foliage, and filler flowers, to go with those focal flowers. The costly focal flowers like roses, peonies, orchids, dahlias, ranunculus, French tulips, anemones, etc., can be mixed with less expensive flowers like carnations, mums, alstroemeria, statice, and a whole slew of garden-grown-beauties to keep your cost down.

The seasonality of flowers affects cost and expectations.

For a good reason, choosing flowers in season will be the most cost-effective. Peonies in August are challenging to get and very expensive ($8 – $10/stem), and if you do get them, they are coming out of storage that is on the tail end of acceptable; they will not be of decent quality.

Even if you put off your wedding so that you can order peonies from South America, they will be expensive for you here in the northern hemisphere. It takes a lot to get them here, which is a giant carbon footprint, but possible.

Market demand, current fashion, and style can affect the cost of your flowers, even if they are in season.

If you’ve been on Pinterest, you will see bouquet after bouquet of drop-dead gorgeous arrangements filled with ranunculus, anemones, tulips, and other specialty cut flowers from the garden.  They are soft, romantic, and over-the-moon heart-stopping.

Because these blooms are so desirable, they receive premium pricing in the wholesale world. That bouquet likely has 25-30 stems of ranunculus alone.  At the wholesale cost and in season, they can be $3+/per stem. That’s the wholesale cost!  And because they don’t ship well, you will have waste. Not every stem you receive will be premium or even useable.

That floral combo sweeping the internet is the perfect storm of beautiful, luxurious, flowers. And, to be honest, you don’t even have to be a talented floral designer; those flowers work their magic all by themselves. And you’re looking at a $250 – $400 bouquet design. 

Heck, even baby’s breath was affected by market demand and popularity. It use to be inexpensive until everyone started using it. The demand increased, and so did the price.

Holidays affect market demand and pricing too.

Make sure you set your wedding during a time that is not too close to a major holiday. Across the board, flower prices go up during holidays like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day.

If you’re flexible, you will have no worries.

There is usually an acceptable substitution when thinking about the texture, size, and role a particular flower plays in a design. A good substitute for peonies in August is a garden rose or dahlia. And when you go with something in season, you can actually grow and have these flowers available to celebrate your wedding anniversary every year, making the flowers memorable and meaningful.

BE FLEXIBLE. What takes the internet by storm is not realistic for everyone. Every season offers something beautiful and personal to delight in and beautify their wedding.

Dried flowers are also a new and exciting possibility

I’m just going to touch quickly on dried flowers for wedding and event design.  The unique, vintage, and timeless beauty of dried flowers is growing in popularity. A quick search of all the possibilities will open your eyes to the options and is an excellent choice for people who are conscious of their carbon footprint and seasonality.

We grow and dry lots of flowers all summer long to capture the beauty of the season and extend our offerings, and we feel that we can bring a fair-priced product to the market as a local supplier. But be informed. There are reality checks here as well.

First, they are timeless and last for years; this increases their value and matches the extra time and careful handling it takes to preserve them. They require particular environments and storage facilities to accommodate their delicate nature, thus increasing the cost.   

Second, you likely saw all the boho and shabby-chic designs incorporating preserved and bleached material. This bleached material looks fantastic, and I love it, but bleached and preserved items are different than air-dried flowers; they require special processing and handling to achieve that bleached look and are not an inexpensive choice.

No doubt, as you searched for dried flower arrangements on the internet, you were wildly amazed at the beauty and nostalgia of this rediscovered off-season choice.  

Overall, if you are budget conscious and can find a local grower who dries flowers and grasses, you can achieve a similar aesthetic.   Only incorporate a few of those costly bleached stems and you can create a perfect Boho look.

Yes, dried flowers are an excellent and exciting choice; just be aware when you’re stepping into the spendier territory.

Sources for ordering flowers are multiplying all the time and have their advantages and disadvantages.

Grow your own cut flowers

This is an excellent choice for someone who enjoys gardening and has experience growing flowers. It’s lovely to have all the textures and variety that garden-grown flowers bring to a design. Gone are the days of just carnations, roses, and baby’s breath.

And, if you choose a colorful wedding palette,  it will be less stressful, and something is likely to be blooming.

Know that just because a flower does not ship well does not mean it does not make an excellent cut flower. And on the flip side, not every flower makes a good cut flower. Some will not hydrate and hold in a vase.

Your garden-grown blooms can be difficult to time.

We already talked about the seasonality of flowers. If you are a gardener, you know you are looking for flowers that will be blooming at the time of your event.

Be aware that weather may play with the timing of your blooms. A hot spring will speed everything up, and it may be past its prime, or it may be a cool spring, and things may be late blooming.

Bugs may decide to move in, and you will want to be ready for that ahead of time by having safer soap or another type of insecticide ready.

And while I love bees, they are the enemy to someone wanting the perfect bloom at the right time. Once a blossom is pollinated, it moves to the next stage of its life by quickly dropping its petals and making a seed. Ugh!!

But don’t let these truths about growing discourage you.  If you grow flowers for your wedding, you will likely have something beautiful to add to your designs.

Potted flowers

I highly suggest planting potted flowers for your event. Not only are they moveable, but they also add a lot of beauty to the venue and are multi-purpose for the entire season. Plan them in your wedding colors.

Planting your landscape

Another area to incorporate garden-grown design is planting your landscape with flowers and keeping it tidy for the wedding day. This is a fantastic way to create a beautiful ceremony and reception area that may not need any arrangements.

Finally, if you focus on growing flowers for the reception tables, you may only need the personal flowers designed. That will save money and eliminate some headaches. 

Purchasing a designed wedding package and then tackling the reception flowers with what you grow is doable.

Choosing the right flowers for the right place.

Tough flowers and delicate flowers; know where to use them and not to use them.

Many flowers are excellent cut flower choices, they just don’t ship well or aren’t as tough to external factors. This is where we see the “industry standards” like roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, baby’s breath, and leather leaf ferns draw a hard line in the sand and are known as super-tough, long-lasting flowers.

The fact that they can be harvested, stored, shipped long distances out of water, and then sit in a cooler or on the floor at the grocery… and still provide beauty for a week in your home is impressive. And it shaped the flower world for the past few generations.

Think about where your flowers will be used at the wedding and choose your flowers appropriately for that location. If you have an outdoor wedding, know where the sun is at the specific time of your ceremony and reception, and plan to place everything so that flowers and guests will survive.

No flower likes direct afternoon sunlight on a hot, dry, summer day, and neither do your guests. If you place an arbor in an open field without shade and the day is 90 degrees or more, your flower choice will matter and it will affect when you can design the installation. It needs to be close to the ceremony time. Furthermore, you will want to choose only the toughest flowers, provide water sources, and spray the flowers with water regularly until the ceremony.

Same with the reception and other focal areas. If everything is in direct sunlight, place the flowers closer to the wedding time and spritz them generously. If you have a somewhat protected area, you’re fine, and all the flowers will perform well.

Thankfully, the industry is shifting back to how it used to be done, reintroducing many of the old garden blooms and experimenting with all the new. There are so many more floral choices now, especially as more growers spring up. Many flowers don’t ship well, but they still provide a good vase life and are the magic of creating something unique and unforgettable.  That being said, let’s not take it too far. 

Flowers die in 90+ degree weather.

I remember a time I supplied DIY flowers for a wedding during an unexpected heat wave. I delivered the flowers on Wednesday so they could get all the design work done.

This is acceptable and doable in a cool place. Dahlias were their main flower. It was an outdoor wedding and that week just happened to be record-breaking topping out at 103◦. I had personally never felt temperatures that high before here in North Idaho.

Upon delivery, their cool place to store the flowers was an uninsulated garage, which probably was a cool place back in April when the wedding was being planned.  It was not now. They stored them in the air-conditioned home until the wedding, but when those flowers went outside in that extreme heat, they did not last. And they wouldn’t. Nothing will last in that high of heat, not even the tough flowers…ok maybe a carnation??

 I happen to remember that weekend well because it was also my son’s wedding. Luckily, we had a church ceremony and an indoor venue, but the night before rehearsal dinner at a jazzy, local, new restaurant, proved intolerable.

The air conditioning was broken, so they opened the glass garage doors to supply a breeze for relief. There was not a single tree around, we were surrounded by pavement, and no way was it only 103 degrees in that environment.

The flowers and the guests at once started wilting, and neither lasted. Unlucky? Yes. But the food was good.

If your wedding is outdoors, you should look carefully at your setup and place things with the sun in mind, and have a rain plan. The weather can do three different things in one day around here. 

Understand the workload of designing DIY flowers and make a week-of plan.

Prepare clean buckets and clean water.

When your flowers are ready to be picked up or have arrived in the mail, you will need plenty of ultra-clean, buckets.

Dirty buckets, containers, vases, and dirty water ARE THE #1 KILLER OF FLOWERS!!  Let me say that again. BACTERIA KILLS FLOWERS! Knowing that is absolutely THE secret of my entire business. Be extra sure your water is clean, put a capful of bleach into the water. Yes, bleach, you want that first drink to be clean. Also, do not use water with a water softener attached to the system; this may kill your flowers.

Flowers like acidic water and water is naturally alkaline, so a bit of white vinegar can lower the ph.

It would be best if you also planned to add floral preservatives to your finished designs. The floral preservative will meet all the needs of your cut flowers,

• It contains a bactericide to keep the water clean.

• It has an acidifier and will lower the ph.

• It will supply a food source so your flowers can continue to bloom and be perfect for your wedding day.

For flowers shipped dry in the box, you will need to recut the bottom 2 inches of every stem, strip any foliage so that none is in the water, and place them into your prepared, clean water.

Give your flowers time to take up water and hydrate, you want them fully conditioned before you begin designing. (If you are getting your flowers from us, this all has been done for you. You will only need buckets so that you can transport your flowers home.)

Set up a workspace with all the supplies you will need.

Vessels and vases can be washed and prepped weeks in advance, dropping this task the week of your wedding.

You will need scissors, pruners, garbage cans, florist’s water-proof tape, florists binding tape, chicken wire, floral foam, pearl pins, ribbon for personal flowers, cold glue floral adhesive, and any other items to make everything go smoothly. And have extra pruners and scissors for your helpers.

• Do not let your flowers run out of water.  They drink a surprising amount so be sure to check the water every day.   
• Do not leave your flowers in a car with windows rolled up.  Cut flowers do not like high heat.
• Do not put your flowers in a freezer (It has happened). But you can put them in a walk-in cooler, this is ideal. Just be careful of fruit and vegetables, they release ethylene gas and will cause many flowers to shatter. 
• Be aware that some flowers do not like cool refrigeration and are better left out of the cooler, like zinnias, tropical flowers, and some delicate, heat-loving foliage, like basil.  Your grower should know which ones and keep them in separate buckets.
• Always design your flowers into a container with water in it.  If that stem end dries out, it cannot take up water so when you finally add water it will continue to wilt and die. 
• I’ll never forget showing up to design an arch and the wedding party was designing the DIY reception flowers into dry containers; they thought they would add water when they were done. I don’t know how long the flowers had been out of water laying on tables as everyone casually got things done, but they were wilty and not holding their shape and the wedding was 2 hours away.

Have a cool place to store your flowers

Keep the flowers as cool as possible and out of direct sunlight until you design them. Then, have plenty of space in a cool area once they are designed. Understandably, the space needed for buckets of flowers is quite different than the space required for designed flowers.

I recommend designing a couple of days before your event because not every flower has the same vase life. A carnation could go for weeks, but a particular dahlia may only go for three days.

You want them all alive and beautiful at showtime. They will continue to bloom and be at their peak for your event.

Think about the time it takes to design.

To understand your workload and get everything done, you will need to estimate how long each floral element will take to design. This is huge and surprising.

Walk down your list and assign an amount of time that you think each piece will take you to create.

For example, let’s say you have 30 tables, and it’s going to take you 30 minutes to create a masterpiece pedestal arrangement for each. 

30 minutes x 30 arrangements is 900 minutes. (This does not include prepping the vases and preparing the space and flowers) 900 minutes is 15 hours… with no breaks. Plan for that!

Maybe you’re putting 5 bottles on each table. That is 150 bottles to clean, prep, and design.   Each may take you 3 minutes. If you don’t lose any steam in the middle of the project, that is 3 min. x 150 bottles = 450 minutes.  That is 7 ½ hours.

Maybe you’re faster; maybe you’re slower; perhaps you have a system for streamlining.  It’s all good; just be aware and plan.

That 30^th design or 150^th bottle is likely not being designed as quickly or with as much enthusiasm as the first one, and sometimes you need to walk away for a bit.

Involve your family and friends.

Get friends and family involved to help with the workload and efficiently execute a plan. If you know someone that designs, that’s even better.

If you have a group of friends and want to drink some wine on a Thursday night while designing flowers, that’s a bargain.

Assign someone to transport and place all the flowers at the venue so that you can have a hassle-free wedding day.

Pro Tip: Attend our basic design class with your group of helpers here on the farm this summer. It would be an excellent opportunity to gain experience in designing flowers. You would go into your week-of, do-it-yourself design with a level of comfort and understanding.

Watch these two tutorials: 

• What to expect when you receive your bunched flowers and
• How to make your flowers last.

• And here is a great blog post on Designing with foliage to make it stretch.

If this seems overwhelming, consider creating time and space the week of your wedding by designing some simple DIY arrangements for the reception tables and having your personal flowers designed professionally. Any combination of DIY and Designed flowers can be ordered.

How much will DIY flowers cost?

It’s important to know what flowers cost so that you have a good understanding of how much your budget can be.  The number of bridesmaids and the number of guests are two areas that can quickly multiply a budget.

Think… if you allow a $20 budget per reception table in DIY flowers and you have 300 guests and need 30 tables, that is $600 right there, just in flowers – no design, no vessel.

This is also where you need to think about your vases and containers. The size of your vessels are tied to the number of flowers you will need. Bud vases and bottles use far fewer flowers than a pedestal vase with a 6” opening.

I have a really short blog post precisely on this topic. How many DIY flowers will I need, and how much will they cost? After considering the above information, it has two examples of what an average wedding would cost for a simple vs. lush wedding design.

It further explains the calculations and offers you a wedding flowers list so you can create your wish list, and helps you pull your wedding flower budget together. It is a must-read. I will link it below as well so you can keep reading.

Money-saving ideas to repurpose your designs for other areas of your wedding.

• All your ceremony flowers could be moved to the reception area to save money and design time.
• If you have aisle flowers, those could become your table centerpieces.
• Any ceremony arrangements could be placed around the sweetheart table or head table, framing the couple and wedding party.
• How about moving the flowers from the guest signing book to the bar or cake table?
• Could the bridesmaid’s bouquets decorate the head table or other reception areas? Ahead of time, strategically place a perfect-sized vase where you want them to leave their bouquets.
• Use one of the bridesmaid’s bouquets as your tossing bouquet.
• Consider thanking your helpers by gifting your table arrangements and flowers to them at the end of the evening.

Great ideas, right? But be sure to assign someone the task of moving the flowers while guests are congratulating you and moving towards the reception area.

Encourage them to be “Johnny-on-the-spot” to get it done quickly and smoothly.

Finally, you don’t have to decorate everything, everywhere.  You can save money by focusing on a single focal area; this way the eye will be drawn away from areas that are an eyesore by creating a beautiful focal area.  

And if you happen to have a venue with a beautiful view, that is perfect, you don’t need to decorate something already beautiful.

Conclusion

Flowers are always the right choice to welcome your guests and transform the space.  Only when the flowers arrive does your dream take shape and become what you expected.

You’ve learned that cost and time depend a lot on the size of your wedding and your style. It’s going to take a bit of a plan to pull it all together, and I suggest you gather and team and create a week-of design plan. There is a lot that goes into planning and creating beautiful flowers.

 How Many DIY Flowers will I Need and How Much Will They Cost, is a short blog post to help you easily generate a DIY flower budget.