Flowers are an important part of many wedding celebrations. It is always good to spend time thinking about which flowers you will choose for the bride’s bouquet as well as the table centrepieces. This may depend on what time of year it is and what happens to be in bloom, but many flowers also have meanings that you should be aware of.

Have in mind the colour you want to choose first of all. If you have a colour theme prepared for your wedding you will want to choose flowers that blend in with that. But you also want to think about the message you want to convey with your chosen flowers.

For example, red chrysanthemums mean ‘I love you’. What better message could there be for a wedding? Yellow irises meanwhile convey passion, which could also be very appropriate for a wedding!

Think about different combinations of wedding flowers as well, and what the combined meanings could point to. For example a combination of red and white chrysanthemums would give out a nice message, since the white variety means truth. So the combined message would tell people that the message ‘I love you’ stands for truth.

Of course you can get too bogged down in trying to go for the best meanings and forget about the look of the flowers themselves. There might be some that you simply don’t like, or the flower with the nicest meaning won’t fit in with your colour scheme.

It is always wise to check the meanings of specific flowers before opting for any of them though. You don’t want to have a nice display and then find out all the flowers mean something inappropriate for your wedding day. For example dahlias apparently mean instability! Not the best start for your married life together, is it?

Another good example is not to opt for a flower simply because it sounds nice. There is a flower called ‘love in mist’ which sounds like an ideal choice for a wedding. But the meaning of this particular flower is perplexity, which basically means confusion. It may have a nice name but it obviously isn’t ideal for a wedding bouquet or for the table decorations.

Sometimes the best way to go is to look at the various meanings of flowers and see if any stand out as being particularly appropriate to you both on your wedding day. You can then think of flowers you both like and check that their meanings will be good for the day as well. Some countries may have different meanings attached to various flowers though, so if you research online be sure you find a UK website to look on.

Sometimes meanings of certain flowers will change through time as well. For example yellow roses used to mean infidelity in some circles, but nowadays most people know that they stand for quite the opposite. Now they mean that love will last forever, which is a much more positive reason to use them at your wedding.

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