Avoid These Flowers
Summer in Tahoe equals long nights of celebrating your nuptials, beautiful sunsets, crisp Tahoe water dips, and starry skies you can see for miles; I am all about a good summer wedding. But I am here to give you a tip about the flowers chosen during the height of the parallel wedding season and our heat.
I want to preface this with, whom ever you hire to be your florist, I hope you chose them because you trust their design skills are complimentary with you wedding aesthetic. Most wedding florists already know this from experience. There is nothing quite like having your bride tell you half the flowers died in the centerpiece before the night was over. Wedding flowers are only meant to last for a few hours once they are set and designed, usually 6-10 hours. However; there are a few flowers that I tend to not use during the peek of the hot months (in Tahoe and Reno this is July and August) and while they are actually some of my favorites they just don’t hold up well in day times highs of 90+ degrees and can sometimes disappoint.
Garden Roses
You may be surprised with this. I absolutely LOVE garden roses! I can never have enough on my farm and in my designs. There ‘s an ancient connection with these garden beauties that dates way beyond our time. The are romantic, classic, timeless, and fluffy but in really high heat they don’t do well. If you have hired a traditional florist or a florist who does not have close connections with a local farmer, they are ordering garden roses likely from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Those fluffy beauties are tired and have travelled far and wide to make their presence and tend to begin withering away before they ever make it into that centerpiece or your bouquet. Of course there are many cautions and tricks we florists have up our sleeves to preserve their beauty but there is only so much we can do and garden roses will not last very long in our Sierra heat.
A really great alternative is lisianthus! Last year, I was helping design a wedding for another regional florist and placed a single stem of lisianthus in my hair behind my ear. I forgot about it all day until I came home many hours later and jumped into the shower. I laid the lisianthus down on my bed side table out of water and again forget about her until I retired for the night. I picked her up and she was still going strong without any wilting in the slightest. She had been out of water in 95 degree heat for over 11 hours!
Pansies
Oh how I love pansies, especially the Antique Shades. They are the perfect flower to use for bridging colors together and add such a dainty and romantic feel to anything they are design in. Most farmers do not grow many of these because they can rather tricky to get the stems long enough for wedding use but when you find a farmer than can, hold onto them for dear life! While I love pansies, I would not ever use them during a summer wedding in our heat. They are one of the fastest to wilt and look dead. When they wilt the flower heads bob down and close in on themselves so instead of that vibrant and colorful center we all love, they just look like a tiny ball of mush.
A good alternative is small headed zinnias. When processed well and given care, zinnias do wonderfully in heat. A lot of zinnias have multi-colored petals and some even have an ombre effect. A tip: NEVER put zinnias in your cooler, refrigerator or someplace colder than about 45 degrees. They will durn brown and become unusable. Placing them in a cool area out of direct sun is advised.
Orlaya
The last goody I will include is Orlaya. A lacy, elegant addition to any arrangement, bouquet, centerpiece, or arch she is a force to be reckoned with. She dances at the tops of those centerpieces and creates a very airy feeling to anything she is added to. However; during our Sierra heat she is not reliable, ever! Some new farmers do not know the proper harvesting stage and their little side shoots will begin to wilt immediately. Those shoots just get weaker and weaker as the day and heat progress. Instead of make a statement like she does in the spring time, she will become the sad topic of the floral arrangement.
A goo alternative is scabiosa, in particular the perennial varieties. These have strong sturdy stems to support their large headed bloom and can withstand high heat and blazing sun. Scabiosa come in a variety of colors and if freshly cut can last for many days.
Our high desert heat can be challenging to work in when it comes to flowers and as climate change continues to heat up notoriously cool regions of the world little nuggets of info like this become invaluable. I hope you enjoyed this and maybe learned something. If you have another suggestion for a flower that you wouldn’t use during high heat summer weddings, drop us a comment; we’d love to hear from you!