I’ve had the privilege of working with Petal’s Edge, a wedding floral company based in Alexandria, VA, for a number of years now and always love working with them. Recently, I interviewed owner Gerry Rogers who, along with her business partner Rebecca Henry, has great insight into wedding florals and offers here some tips and trends for brides and grooms.
photo credit: Sandi Foraci
photo credit: The Observatory
1) Tell us a little bit about Petal’s Edge and your approach to floral design.
First off, we are a little different than the florist most people think of. We are not a shop but rather we specialize in providing floral designs for weddings and events. Since the very beginning, we have done weddings more than anything else. We are also a small company, and so the person you meet with is also your contact through out the process, the person who builds or has direct oversight over your arrangements and often the very person setting up for the event. We like maintaining our fingers in all parts of our events as not only a quality control measure but because we like what we do!
In terms of our approach to floral design, what we do is help the couple choose flowers that will best reflect the look and style they want for their wedding. For example, a modern style is characterized by clean lined flowers, monochromatic designs and often arrangements that use one type of flower. On the other hand, more romantic styles use more rounded flowers – roses, hydrangea, lisianthus. A traditional look tends to incorporate accents of greenery. We don’t think of any flower as “filler”. We generally advocate for a restrained color palette – either working tonally with 2-3 colors that are next to each other on the color wheel or with just a few contrasting colors. Green is the one “free” color, as in flowers, it complements any color scheme. We feel that these guidelines, along with specific flower choices, create a cohesive look.
2) What trends are you are seeing right now in wedding florals?
In a lot of magazines and on-line blogs, there’s a lot of talk about “vintage”. Realistically, though, we do very few vintage looks primarily because we have predominantly city weddings. Our couples are still looking for urban chic designs or DC-traditional looks. When branching away from more modern designs, our couples embrace texture and classic garden looks.
3) What are the top things a bride should know about or think through before she meets with a florist to discuss her wedding flowers?
A bride (or groom!) should definitely know what the color scheme is for the wedding. There are so many options that having this in mind helps us narrow down the possibilities and make tangible suggestions. While we don’t expect anyone to know anything about flowers, it is also helpful to have a general sense for the look and style of the wedding. And finally, while most people don’t have a strong sense of what flowers cost, it is important to either be flexible about what you want or spend some time researching what flowers cost. We provide pricing information on our website for that purpose, but the rule of thumb is that flowers are often 8-10% of a wedding’s costs, with particularly large weddings or weddings with large bridal parties driving costs to the higher end of the range or above that.
Thanks for sharing, Gerry!
