How to make your wedding flowers eco friendly
If you want to be super eco friendly for your wedding flowers, here are some ideas of how you can go about it.
Make sure the flowers are locally grown, there are plenty of local flower growers who are part of a network called Flowers from the Farm. You can pop into your local farm or grower and see what they have to offer and they will be able to tell you what will be available for your wedding date.
Don’t use any foam (you know the green blocks called Oasis that you can place flowers in for your arrangement.) Instead use vases, bottles, jam jars for your arrangements . You’ll be doing the Earth a good deed. Oasis is made from oil derivatives so it doesn’t biodegrade. There is an Oasis biodegradable product which I’ve used and it should biodegrade by half in one year however the jury is out as to how many years after that it takes to break down the other half.. Using moss wrapped in chicken wire is a much better solution. I’ll be doing a blog on this later.
Give away the arrangements to guests or to a hospice or old people’s home as wedding flowers can last for at least 4 days after the event if not more.
Recycle your jam jars or vases or sell them on eBay
Reduce plastic and reuse any plastic trays you may have used for your flower arrangements. The trays that hold the foam or the moss/chicken wire can be reused, make sure the wedding venue dont throw them away.
Use candles instead of battery driven twinkly lights. Candles look very romantic and the twinkly lights use a lot of batteries. Batteries can be recycled but it takes a lot of energy to recover the zinc in an AA so it makes sense not to use them in the first place it you can. If you need them , try rechargable batteries instead.
I hope that’s helpful, floristry in the Uk is trying to reduce air miles wherever possible but it’s got a long way to go.
If you’d like to make your own wedding flowers, please have a look at my workshops. I also do flower crown hen parties
References Flowers from the Farm https://www.flowersfromthefarm.co.uk/members/balsham-house-flowers
Helen