A peony the size of a fist, packed so tight on Monday it looks like it will never open, and by Friday morning it has unfurled into something that barely fits in two cupped hands. That is June in the workroom. If you are planning a summer wedding and want a florist in Bristol who works with what the season actually gives, this is the window everyone asks for and few people understand, so let me walk you through what is really sitting in the bucket from now until the end of August.
Couples come to me in Westbury-on-Trym with a photo saved on their phone. Usually it is an arrangement shot in a studio back in February, using stems flown in from Holland and Kenya. I never want to crush that. What I do instead is show them the same week of their wedding, done with flowers grown an hour up the road. Nine times out of ten, they like the real thing better.
What's in bloom, June through August
June belongs to peonies and delphiniums. A peony has a season of roughly six weeks in this country, and once they are gone they are gone until next year, which is why a June bride who loves them is a lucky one. Delphiniums give you that tall spire of true blue, a colour you genuinely cannot fake with anything imported, and they bring height without bulk. Sweet williams, hardy geraniums, the first scented garden roses. June is generous.
Come July, the dahlias start, and I wait for them all year. They arrive in every shade from clotted-cream white to a burgundy so deep it reads almost black by candlelight, and a single dahlia head can carry an entire buttonhole on its own. Hydrangeas come in alongside them. Those great mophead blooms in dusky blue and antique green do more work in a table centrepiece than any three other flowers put together. For sheer choice, July is the most reliable month of the whole wedding year.
August softens. The cosmos come into their own then, all fluttering single petals on wiry stems, and the sweet peas are still climbing if the summer has been kind. Sweet peas are the one flower I cannot smell without thinking of a wedding. They do not last long once cut, four or five days at the most, so I treat them as a luxury for the day itself rather than the rehearsal. By late August the rudbeckia and the first early dahlias of autumn start nudging the palette towards gold, which suits a late-summer wedding beautifully.
Why British-grown earns its place
I will be honest about the trade-off, because you deserve that from your florist. British-grown stems are not always cheaper, and what you can get in any given week depends on the weather rather than a catalogue. What you gain makes up for it.
Scent comes first. An imported rose bred to survive a refrigerated lorry has usually had the perfume bred out of it, while a garden rose cut in Somerset on Wednesday will fill a marquee. Then there is vase life. A flower harvested locally and in your hands within a day or two lasts longer than one that spent a week in transit, and that matters when your bouquet needs to look as good in the evening photographs as it did walking down the aisle. The carbon footprint is far lower too, with no air freight behind it. Last comes reliability, which couples tend to underrate. I would rather promise you what I know the Bristol and Somerset growers will have that week than promise you one specific stem from three thousand miles away and then watch the flight get cancelled.
If you want the longer version of why local blooms win, I have written about it over on our wedding flowers page.
Bouquets, buttonholes, tables and arches
A summer bridal bouquet wants movement. I build them loose and a little asymmetric, letting a delphinium or a stem of cosmos break the outline rather than trimming everything down to a neat dome. Buttonholes are where dahlias and single garden roses shine: one good flower with a sprig of something soft, pinned so it sits flat against the lapel and survives a long day of hugs.
Table centrepieces are where your budget stretches furthest in summer. Hydrangeas and a few dahlias in low bowls down a long trestle look abundant for surprisingly little, because the flowers themselves are large and the season is already doing half the work. Ceremony arches are the big statement. My honest advice is to keep the flowers concentrated at two corners rather than smothering the whole frame. Greenery from the hedgerows, a generous cluster of blooms right where the eye lands, and you have something that reads beautifully in every photograph without costing the earth.
When to book, and what to ask
For a June to August wedding, a good wedding florist in Bristol is often booked nine to twelve months ahead. Peak Saturdays in July go first. If your date is close and you have left it late, ask anyway, because cancellations happen and a working florist can usually do more with three weeks' notice than you would think.
When you meet your florist, ask three things. What will actually be in season the week of my wedding, not in general? Where do you source from? And what happens if my first-choice flower has a bad growing year? A florist who answers those plainly is one you can trust with the most photographed day of your life. If you would rather start with a conversation than a contract, come and find your Bristol florist in person, or browse what we are gathering this week on our shop.
Picture the morning of it. Buckets of just-cut stems lined up in the cool of the workroom, the smell of sweet peas before anyone has touched a thing, and somewhere in among them the exact flowers that were growing in a Somerset field three days before they reached your hands.