So, we’re still looking for Photographers. The first team of photographers would be working for 6 hours, which is great, but I still can’t feel good about about the Rights thing. So, any suggestions are welcome! Email anything you got to degrootwolfe (at) gmail (dot) com

Finding Flowers: A Rose is a Rose is not a Poppy.

I made my first stop at the Flower Factory yesterday, and it looks like that’s where we’ll stay. Great prices, beautiful designs, friendly staff, straight-from-grower flowers…couldn’t ask for more. I ended up getting burnt orange roses, an ivory hydrangea, green berries and pearls.

That’s all well and good, but I seem to have problem.

No poppies.

My wedding theme (in my mind anyway) was completely 60’s Poppies. Besides being kitsch-wonderful, poppies are simple, kind of funky without being too crazy and best of all, something different from traditional roses. But alas, poppies are spring-only as are any similar flowers, so…it looks like we’re back to roses. Of course, eliminating poppies from the wedding altogether brings up a whole new set of changes. such as the cake design, where poppies were to be prominent, and the floral arrangements, which I *really* don’t want to be roses—-but I’ll touch on that later, perhaps.

But roses. Sigh. Don’t get me wrong, I love basic roses. They’re beautiful and I love getting them as gifts and tokens, but I’m struggling with them as the dominant wedding flower. At the very least, I was hoping for cabbage roses, something a bit more vintage and unique with some texture, but as it turns out, if a regular rose is $1, a cabbage rose is $6, and that gets expensive fast. Even if I couldn’t have all cabbage roses, maybe one or two would work, right? I think it would, anyway. Hmm….


“I am an expensive cabbage rose with a snooty English accent and you can’t afford me! Watch me taunt you with my awesome bulbous head and Victorian sensibilities!”


“I’m cheap and beautiful. Buy me, frig.”

Needless to say, I want to go back. I went with Nanny (my dad’s mom) and my mother, and it was a bit like Flower Trivia than an easy meeting to pick out bouquet flowers. Nanny knows her stuff, so I felt sort of back seat as the flower lady and Nanny spat out obscure floral names faster than I could tell them I wasn’t interested in Monkeytail. It was still pleasant, and nothing against the flower lady herself, but I felt like I was pushed by both of them into flowers without really knowing my options—-and there are lots of them! I want to be completely happy with these friggin expensive flowers, so I’ll look around a bit more, grab some photos of what I know I like, and hopefully I’ll be able to make it back (with Dan, who isn’t so learned on flowers) to figure things out in a calm, unhurried manner.