Those of you who’ve been following our wedding journey will remember that I wrote a post about my search for the perfect florist; one that would make our wedding flowers feel personal. 

After a trip to Brides the Show, I met up with the wonderful Zita Elze at her shop in Kew Gardens to discuss ideas. Zita asked me to create a mood board to reflect the colour palette we wanted.  And so, several hours spent on Pinterest later – I created of a very colourful, physical mood board.

The creative elements of planning our wedding were definitely my favourite. From briefing Gavin Strange aka Jam Factoryon the design our incredible save the dates and invites, to up-cycling a 1950s vintage wedding dress with The Lady That Does – (post here soon!)

In order to get properly stuck in to choosing and creating my own wedding flowers, I arranged to meet Zita and her assistant Lauren outside their shop at 5:45am and travelled with them to New Covent Garden Flower Market to buy my blooms. 

Our crack of dawn hunt for wedding flowers was really exciting stuff. Imagine a kid in a sweet shop and you can begin to imagine just how big my eyes grew, trying to take in all of the gorgeous flowers and foliage on display. If you go to New Covent Garden Flower Market without someone like Zita who a) really knows her stuff and b) is well respected by the sellers, you’ll soon find that it all gets a bit confusing – there’s no price on anything!

Thankfully, I’d settled on a budget with Zita beforehand. She encouraged me to choose all of the flowers that I absolutely loved and went with my colour scheme. If you come to New Covent Garden Flower Market you can soon get very carried away and end up spending THOUSANDS OF POUNDS in the blink of an eye. The sellers scrawl the names of the flowers and their prices onto carbon copy paper, which the florist settles by invoice later. Some of the blooms, like the orange lilies, were particularly expensive. So be sure to ask how much before you blow your budget.

Here’s a list of the flowers, wood, grasses and foliage on offer at New Covent Garden Flower Market on May 5th. I know that when I was hunting for a list of wedding flowers to guide me, this would have been particularly useful. I hope you find it of use too.

I pretty much went all out and chose 30+ different varieties of flowers and assorted foliage to fill our wedding venue. I’ve added the names of some of the flowers (pictured above) to the photo of them on the kerb, to give you an idea of what things look like.

You soon realise where your budget goes. When you see first-hand how much work goes into conditioning the flowers to keep them looking at their best; it’s a lot of work!

I stuck around the shop for a while and helped Lauren and Zita fill up vases and prepared the blooms (it was no real hardship; it’s probably THE most beautiful florist in London – if not the UK!)  The following day my mum, bridesmaid Laura and good friends Sarah and Pauline were coming to join me on the next part of the journey: our DIY floristry lesson at Zita Elza Design Academy. 

The academy runs monthly, weekly and daily courses, including Zita’s incredible floral embroidery. I’ve got lots of photos to share with you from our experience in my next post, which I’ll link to here once it’s published.

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If you’re keen to find out what else we got up to over the course of 18 months of wedding planning, take a look here: http://lucieloves.co.uk/tagged/lekxjmgwedding

Photography © Lucie Kerley