wedding flowers

Well, I know where I'm not getting flowers for the wedding. Today I hosted a baby shower for my sister-in-law, and I went to Whole Foods to get her a nice big bouquet. I ended up getting white daisies and hot pink gerbera daisies and myrtle leaves, which did make a gorgeous centerpiece. At least some of them were "whole trade" but I was seriously shocked at the amount of plastic that came with those flowers. Also, the whole trade designation does include an element of environmental sustainability, but does not mean that the flowers are organic.

I still feel better about getting the flowers at Whole Foods than at the regular grocery store, but there certainly wasn't less plastic on them than there would have been if I got them somewhere else. Each bunch was wrapped in one of those cellophane floral bags, so three of those (plus the girl at the checkout offered me a floral bag to hold all three bunches together -- I said no, of course!) plus the gerberas had plastic tubes over the stems to keep them standing upright, plus each bunch was held together with a rubber band, plus each bunch had one of those little floral preservative packets. Now I'm wishing that I took pictures of all of the plastic before I threw it away AND the flowers before I gave them away. Oops!

I have a friend who wants to talk to me about wholesale flowers for the wedding, and I'll start checking farmer's markets as soon as they open in mid/late May (but I have a feeling that early June here is too early for great local flowers), and I'm going to look into the option of borrowing flowers, but in the back of my mind I had thought that I could always just get them at Whole Foods. Guess not.