Top Tips For Droop-Free Wedding Bouquets

Because many wedding preparations start in the morning and stretch into the late afternoon, you’ll need your flowers delivered well before the ceremony. If it’s a warm day, you could find you and your bridesmaids stuck with wilted, dropping flowers. But don’t worry — there’s plenty you can do.

Keeping It Cool

Most of the bouquets and other floral arrangements will come in either vases or small plastic bags of water. These are designed to keep them moist and pert until the start of the wedding. And while keeping them in these packages are a good way to stop your flowers from wilting, there are other ways to spruce them up.

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If you get flowers that aren’t as perky, you can run the ends of the bouquets under cold water as you cut the ends at an angle. This helps create new channels for the water to flow through. Place the bouquets back into their original water, and they should become straighter and livelier within an hour or so.

While some books may claim that you can drop ice cubes in the water to improve a listless arrangement, in reality this only freezes the water’s routes to the flowers, and can cause a sagging bouquet to sag even worse. If you decide to take outdoor pictures, try this: take the bouquets out of the water, dry them off with a paper towel, then stand and pose. Once you’re back inside, place the flowers right back into the water once more, to make sure “drink” all they can before the rigors of the ceremony.

Flower Care, After the Fact

If you’re looking to preserve your bouquet, here are a few tips. Although many florists can help you with preserving the bride’s bouquet, you can also do it yourself. One route is to hang the bouquet upside down as soon as you can after the wedding. This helps the flowers to keep their original shape as they air-dry. The air drying process will take a while, so don’t worry if you’re still waiting on them to dry a month later.

Another way to preserve bouquets is to spray them with hairspray immediately following the reception. Again, hang them upside down. The spray creates a protective layer around the petals and can help the blooms retain their original shape.