Before: Kathy's wedding

This is our very first native wedding!! Exciting!

Confession time - I have worked with natives for years in the florist shops, and whilst I know the varieties pretty well (eg: protea, banksia, waratah etc) I get completely lost on the gazillion different species each one of them has (eg: Banksia Baxterii, Banksia Menziesii, Banksia Praemorsa, Banksia Prionotes, Banksia Occidentalis etc).

So when Kathy came to me to discuss her wedding flowers, I knew it was going to be a learning curve.But Kathy kept it very simple for me. She didn't mind what was in her bouquets but she had 3 requests: that we use natives that are specifically Australian in origin, that if we were going to use colours we would stick to white and oranges, and that the bouquets have a 'just picked from the yard and whacked together' unstructured look to them. The only thing she really wanted included were paper daisies, but unfortunately they are out of season. Kathy was happy to leave it to me and didn't even mind if the bouquet was just full of different textured foliages.

So I began doing my research. I hear alot about brides who want an 'Australian' bouquet and so they pick natives. For any brides out there who are thinking the same thing, please be aware that some of our most popular natives are not Australian in origin. The popular things like your proteas and leucodendrons whilst they are grown in Australia, they actually originated in South African (gasp)!

We ended up with alot of beautiful natives to pick from. Here is what we got:

From the back (clockwise): we have some teatree, kangaroo paw, eucalyptus (silver dollar), sparsa, wooly bush, emu grass, eucalyptus crenulata, pittostrum, eucalyptus tetra nuts, ficifolia nuts, and some white paper daisies (yay I managed to get a little bit)!

I can't wait to see how these bouquets are going to look with so many different textures in them. I'll come back and post some pictures after the weekend.