How to Choose Your Wedding Flowers: Colour, Season & Style

Planning your wedding flowers should be one of the fun parts.

You don't need to know the names of every flower, arrive with a perfectly finished mood board or decide exactly what will be in your bouquet before meeting your florist. In fact, we often find the most beautiful weddings come together when there is a little room for creativity.

As a Melbourne wedding florist, we encourage our couples to start with three things: colour, season and style.

These give us enough direction to understand how you want your wedding to feel, while still allowing us to choose the most beautiful flowers available when your wedding day arrives.

Start with how you want your wedding to feel

Before thinking about individual flowers, think about the overall feeling you're trying to create.

Do you love something romantic and garden-inspired? Soft and whimsical? Modern and sculptural? Colourful and playful? Or perhaps something more elegant and understated?

Your venue, dress, bridesmaid colours, stationery and even the time of year can all help shape this.

We love when couples bring inspiration images, but don't worry about recreating a Pinterest photo flower-for-flower. Instead, show us what you love about it.

It might be the loose shape of the bouquet, an unexpected colour combination, the movement of the flowers or simply the overall feeling.

That's often far more useful to us than an exact flower list.

Choose a colour palette, not just one colour

One of our favourite ways to design wedding flowers is to work with a palette of tones rather than one exact colour.

For example, a pink wedding doesn't necessarily mean every flower needs to be the same shade of pink. We might work with blush, peach, raspberry, soft apricot, cream and touches of green to create depth and make the flowers feel more natural.

The same applies to white and green flowers. Different shades of white, ivory and cream, layered with interesting foliage and texture, can make a seemingly simple palette feel incredibly beautiful.

We also look at the colours already surrounding your flowers — your bridesmaids' dresses, suits, linens, venue and tableware — so everything feels considered without being overly matched.

Let the Melbourne seasons work in your favour

Wedding flowers in Melbourne are wonderfully seasonal, and availability can change from year to year depending on our weather and growing conditions.

Rather than designing your entire wedding around one particular flower, we recommend choosing the look, colour and feeling you love and allowing your florist some flexibility with the varieties.

Peonies, dahlias, tulips, ranunculus, sweet peas and hydrangeas all have their moment.

While some flowers can occasionally be sourced outside their traditional season, they may be imported, more expensive or simply not the beautiful quality we'd want to use.

At Pash, we'd much rather find an incredible seasonal alternative than use a flower that isn't looking its best just because it appeared on the original mood board.

It's part of the beauty of working with flowers — every season brings something different.

Think about your venue

Your wedding flowers don't exist on their own. They're part of the whole space.

After working across so many Melbourne wedding venues, we've learnt that the space itself should always play a part in the floral design.

A beautiful garden venue may need very little added to it, while a large blank room might benefit from more impactful floral moments.

We consider things like ceiling height, table shape, ceremony backdrop, existing gardens, lighting and where guests will naturally look when deciding where flowers will have the most impact.

Sometimes one beautiful ceremony installation creates far more impact than spreading the same budget across lots of smaller pieces.

And wherever possible, we love finding ways to relocate ceremony flowers into your reception, allowing you to enjoy them for more than one part of the day.

Decide where you want your flowers to make an impact

You don't necessarily need flowers everywhere.

Your bridal bouquet is going to be photographed throughout the day, so it's worth creating something you absolutely love.

Ceremony flowers frame one of the most important moments of the wedding and often become the backdrop for photographs afterwards.

At the reception, consider where your guests' eyes naturally go — perhaps it's a beautiful bridal table, the bar, an entrance arrangement or flowers running down long tables.

For some weddings, abundant florals everywhere make sense. For others, a few thoughtfully placed floral moments can be much more effective.

A good wedding florist should help you work out where your budget will make the biggest difference.

Don't worry if you don't know exactly what you want

This is probably one of the most common things we hear during wedding consultations:

"I know what I like, but I don't know how to explain it."

That's completely fine.

Send us the images you're drawn to. Tell us what you don't like as well as what you do. Show us your dress, your venue and your colours.

From there, it's our job to pull those ideas together and create something that feels like you.

At Pash, our wedding process includes a custom mood board so you can see the direction we're envisioning before your flowers are created. As your wedding approaches, we can refine the details based on what's in season and looking beautiful.

Trust your florist

There is always an element of trust involved in choosing wedding flowers.

Flowers are a natural product. Colours vary, seasons shift and sometimes the variety we thought would be perfect months ago simply isn't the best flower at market that week.

That's where having an experienced florist makes a difference.

We choose flowers with a florist's eye — looking at colour, movement, texture, freshness and how everything will work together rather than simply following a recipe.

Your flowers might not be an exact copy of an inspiration photograph.

They should feel like they belong to your wedding.

Wedding Flowers by Pash

From our flower shop in Brighton, Pash Flowers creates bespoke wedding flowers for celebrations across Melbourne and beyond.

Our style is natural, abundant and led by the seasons, with every wedding designed individually around the couple, venue and time of year.

Whether you arrive with a complete Pinterest board or simply know the feeling you'd like to create, we'll help you bring it all together.

Planning your wedding flowers? Explore our Melbourne wedding flowers or get in touch to start creating your floral mood board.