Best DIY Wedding Flowers for Bouquets and Centerpieces (2024)

Part 5of Blooms Blog’s “What Types of Flowers Should I Use for My Wedding” Series:What Types of Flower Arrangements and Bouquets are You Making?

To help you decide what types of flowers to use for your wedding, so far we’ve covered wedding flowers by season, picking DIY-friendly flowers, and matching flowers and accents with your wedding themes. Another keyquestion to ask iswhat kind of bouquets and arrangements do you want to make? Different arrangement styles are easier with certain kinds of flowers and should avoid others.

The easiest way to work through this is to make a running list of all the flower arrangements you will need for the event: bridal bouquet, bridesmaids’ bouquets, centerpieces, and ceremony flowers. Don’t forget the little areas likethe cake table, your sweetheart table, buffet area, seating card table, and gift table. If it’s too much on your plate, you can always delegate the more complicated ones to a florist and just DIY the easy stuff! We get a lot of brides who prefer to have their bouquets done by professionals and leave the centerpieces, boutonnieres and smaller arrangements to themselvestomake the flower arranging fun and stress-free part of the event!

Now, you don’t need to use the same flowers across all of your bouquets and arrangements.Keep your style consistent, and have some elements – kind of flowers or pops of a one or morecolors repeatfor a cohesive look. But you can mix and match vases and containers and other accents. This is a great money-saver, too, because you can keep the more expensive blooms to your most important arrangements (hello, bridal bouquet and groom’s bout!) and use cheaper flowers for other bouquets and centerpieces.

Flowers for WeddingBouquets

A hand-tied wildflower bouquet is the easiest of the DIY wedding flowers and can be really easy on your budget. Start with one or two kinds of medium-to-large focal flowers like roses or dahlias, then addloose, airy fillers and greens. Here are some great combinationsof wildflower wedding flowers. For a cascading bouquet, look for more relaxed fillers and greens that cangive the drape you want, likeamaranthus or ivy. For flowers, keep stems long on roses, and think about stock, delphinium and other flowers that bloom down the stem to make a lusher cascade. A more modernround rose bouquetis made of medium-to-large roses, tightly clustered and with little or no greenery. You can add some berries or small accent flowers within the roses for extra texture. Apageant bouquet can be a show-stopper – look for long-stemmed flowers like roses and calla lilies, and add in some cascading fillers.

Photo By: Lauren Kriedemann | Floral Design By: Green Goddess Flower Studio | Via:The Pretty Blog

TheBoutonniere

Boutonnieres are theeasiest of the DIY wedding flowers! There are tons of onlineboutonniere tutorialsout there, and you can easily swap focal flowers and fillers to suit your wedding theme. Boutonnieres require smaller flowers such as spray roses, ranunculus, or chrysanthemums. Novelties such as billy balls, scabiosa pods, and thistle are also greatgo-to’s for a rustic or whimsical boutonniere. You’ll just want to avoid larger flowers, like peonies, garden roses, and football mums, of course, just for sheer size. Also, watch out for blooms that won’t do well without any water – don’t try to put sprigs of hydrangea or delphinium, for instance, because they’ll shrivel pretty quickly. And more delicate flowers, like waxflower, don’t always hold up well to the handling that boutonnieres tend to go through. And – don’t forgettheboutonniere pins and floral tape and optional twine or ribbon to wrap around the floral tape.

Wedding Centerpieces

Traditionally, arrangements consist of focal 1-2 varieties of focal flowers (roses, garden roses, peonies, calla lilies, ranunculus, gerbera daisies, hydrangeas, dahlias, poppies, carnations),1-2 secondary flowers(chrysanthemums, stock, spray roses, delphinium, larkspur, snapdragons, freesia, mini carnations, hypericum berries, alstroemeria, and asters),1-2 filler flowers(limonium, statice, baby’s breath, wax flower, Queen Anne’s lace, solidago, trachellium, dusty miller and bupleurum), and of course, greens. The most popular greens are the leather leaf, huck, seeded and silver dollar eucalyptus, lemon leaf, coffee foliage, Israeli and Italian ruscus, myrtle, pittosporum, tree fern, sword fern and plumosus fern. Items such as herbs and grasses are also categorized with greens.

Many of today’s popular wedding centerpieces take a simpler, cleaner approach, with fewer flowers in multiple containers on the table. You can also keep things interesting by changing it up on different tables – no more cookie cutter for today’s brides! Just remember that centerpiecesshould be kept somewhat low, as you want your guests to be able to see across the table. So save the gladiolus for ceremony arrangements! Keep your vases and containers low to the table as well.

Flower Garland Wedding Flowers

Garlands and wreaths are a fast-growing trend in wedding flowers and aresurprisingly easy to DIY! You can purchase a handmade, custom greens garland and add flowers to it to tie it in with your wedding style. This can be done by wiring flowers to the pre-made garland and use water tubes for water sensitive flowers like hydrangea. For a smaller, simpler garland, you can use floral wire and tape tocombine greens and flowers orcreate one using a garland foam as a base. The same goes for creating wreaths!

Garlands make lovely, lush centerpieces when setting down the middle of a long table. And really most any flowers and greens will do, so you can tie them in well with your wedding theme.

Once you’ve figured out the kinds and quantities of bouquets and arrangements you want, you can plan how many of each flower and green you’ll need for each. If you need help, give Blooms a call!Our wedding specialists are always here to help youwork through your plansand let you know the best types of flowersto use.

Up next… What kinds of bouquets and arrangements do you want to make?