New Covent Garden Market – picking our wedding flowers

The New Covent Garden Market is THE most awesome, inspiring and vibrant place. I can’t believe I’d never been before!

My incredibly talented friend and florist Pascal Gabory, kindly offered to be the florist for our wedding, which was great as I trust him immensely and have seen his work over the years and have never been disappointed. It also meant that I knew I’d get just want we wanted and that he’d totally get it. I had the added bonus of being able to go along with him to help choose our flowers and daddy came too. So off we went to choose our wedding flowers.

It was a sunny morning, 2 days before the wedding when we arrived New Covent Garden Market. I had a spring in my step as I was back in London, excited for the days ahead and the sun was positively shining. As soon as we walked in, I was happy. There were rows and rows of gorgeous, vibrant flowers just waiting to be picked for our wedding. I knew we wanted our flowers to be natural, spring-like with lots of creams, ivories, greens and blues. So where to start…

We did a loop of the market to take it all in, have a scout around, suss out what we might want. Then we headed to a familiar supplier and gave him our shopping list. I was beaming with excitement. The key to working within a reasonable budget (as flowers can be scarily expensive) is to go with what’s in season as much as you can. You need to be flexible. This doesn’t mean you can’t have your favourite flower (mine is peonies), but you might have to have less of them and more of something else in season. I definitely wanted peonies but they weren’t in season as we’ve had such bad weather this year, so were incredibly expensive compared to some of the others. So my compromise was to have them in my bouquet and not everywhere else. This means I got to have gorgeous peonies all day and in my photos, without breaking the bank. We mixed these with stock, roses, blue hydrangeas and other gorgeous blooms.

See what you think.