When it started
When I first became a wedding venue owner back in 2012, the wedding industry was completely new to me and an in-house elopement florist was a long way off. I came from a (totally) different kind of world of work and had never been involved in hospitality except as a customer and although that had been lovely, running my own hospitality business was a steep learning curve.
Knowing no-one in the industry, I started reaching out to local wedding suppliers to make contacts and build relationships. I still remember Andrew Coulter a photographer (no longer doing weddings after he moved to France), telling me to get in touch with Amanda Randell, a local florist – he thought she could be really helpful. Well I did and he was right, thanks Andy! Not only did I make a great floristry contact, Amanda became one of my closest friends. When Ever After started elopement weddings in 2016, I asked Amanda to join our team as our in-house florist. 6 years and a couple of hundred elopement weddings later, Amanda decided last year that she was moving out of wedding floristry and onto something completely new. I’m so grateful we had Amanda as our florist for so long and wish her so much love and luck in her new projects in Bath.
elopement florist
Being the lovely person she is, Amanda was keen to make sure the transition to a new Ever After elopement florist was as seamless as possible. Amanda suggested 2 qualified florists who had trained with her at The British Academy of Floral Art where Amanda was a tutor. Several emails and meetings later and we all agreed we would appoint both Jodie and Lizzie as joint florists for our weddings and they would split the events between them.
I had already worked with Lizzie last year when she stood in for Amanda a couple of times. And how about this for a compliment from our lovely elopement photographer, Clare Kinchin – she said she hadn’t realised we’d had another florist, they looked just like Amanda’s flowers. Yep that good. Amanda did our last elopement wedding in December and Lizzie and Jodie have taken over the reigns from last week which is the beginning of our 2023 season.
photo shoot
I knew we would need to showcase Jodie and Lizzie’s work here on the blog so you can see for yourselves the quality of what they do and we would also need to include their work in our brochure. With that in mind, we scheduled a photo shoot here at the venue at the beginning of March with our elopement photographer Clare to get some proper profesh pics. Obviously Lizzie and Jodie would create some bouquets and buttonholes as they’re included in our elopement wedding package but I wanted them to show you the optional flowery extras that are available if you choose. Things like, arch sprays and flower clouds and the like.
Let’s start with the bouquet and buttonhole as those are included in your package…
Jodie chose a selection of brights for this, including ranunculus, roses and eryngiums finished with a toning ribbon.
She created a buttonhole and a corsage using the same flowers
Lizzie went for a darker colour palette for one of her bouquets
including roses, cala lilies, clematis and astrantia.
She also created a candelabra arrangement which could be used for the Registrar’s table and later, the wedding breakfast table. You can also see the co-ord buttonhole for this bouquet in the pic below at the front…
extra flowers
Popular optional extras include spray arrangements for our arch for the wedding ceremony. We can move them from the arch after the ceremony and take them down to the terrace to re-use for the rest of your styling.
The sprays can be used to make a curve or a header on the arch as shown below
Aren’t they beautiful?
A new trend we’ve seen recently is for flower clouds which you can just see in the background of the pic above. They tend to have a less structured, formal shape, well I guess they’re kind of cloud shaped. This cloud was created on site by Jodie & Lizzie together and then they moved it from the wedding barn to the riverwalk, so you could have one for an outdoor or indoor ceremony. Don’t forget, a cloud has to hang from something so bear that in mind when thinking of the location…
Jodie put together this amazing centrepiece using some antlers as a base – just perfect for a table setting don’t you think?
smaller extras
Lizzie and Jodie also created some smaller pieces including this one around a key, how lovely would that be as a ring holder?
And this lil terrarium which could be an unusual table arrangement or gift
Maybe you’ve got some chair decorations in mind? How about something like this..?
or these lanterns which you could have hanging during your ceremony and then on your main table or your cake table
dog flowers
and of course no Ever After flowery photo shoot would be complete without some dog flower collar action. Am I right?
So here we have Lizzie’s trusty lab modelling a dog collar matching her lead
and lil Ned on his first modelling assignment
Dog collar decorations are usually made with pipe cleaner attachments so they can fix easily onto the dog’s collar. Of course 2 seconds after this was taken Ned was trying to eat the flowers but he was only 22 weeks old at the time!
And here are some action shots of Lizzie and Jodie working on site on the day of the shoot, Lizzie on the left, Jodie on the right – welcome to the Ever After team ladies!
And thanks as always to Clare Kinchin for the fab pics.
With our elopement package you choose the colours and style of your flowers. You get to consult with our qualified in-house florists directly in the 3 month run up to your wedding date about your ideas and they’ll want to know what you’re both wearing so they can bear that in mind when creating your flowers. If you prefer to leave everything to them, that’s no problem, they’ll look after you. And if you want more flowers for your wedding than the bouquet and buttonhole included, they’d love to help you out with whatever you have in mind.
I’m so pleased to welcome Lizzie and Jodie to the team – you’re going to see some great elopement flowers coming up!
Do go over to our enquiries page to download our current elopement brochure.
And don’t forget you can now check our available dates over on our availability calendar.
I’ll be back shortly with some more detail about some of the creations here, the ideas and thoughts behind them and some flower deets for all you flower buffs out there so watch out for that.
