Gently Colourful with a Fairground Feel

For the last two weeks the delphinium bed has been working very hard, throwing up huge spires of blue and white flowers.  There are two shades of blue in there: a pale translucent one (maybe "Summer Skies"?) and another much darker variety.  Summer skies is a lovely easy colour to mix with other pastel shades and we've found it easy to use.  The dark one, however, seems to clash with everything, but has luckily been in demand with other florists who make striking blue-and-white arrangements with it (not a typically wedding colour combination so we haven't used it in this way ourselves, and the flower spikes are just too huge to wrestle into any of our bouquets for local customers).  However in the flowers for the wedding of Laura and Dan, at Walcot Hall last weekend, the dark delphinium looked beautiful with the blue/mauve/peach/pink palette, which we made wilder with sprays of eucalyptus and jasmine. 

There were so many quirky and delightful personal touches in the decorations, and a "gently colourful with a bit of a fairground feel" brief.  We tried to make floral displays that added to the fun and delight and joy of the day - it was obviously going to be a very happy wedding - without crashing against everything else that was going on: helium balloons, ribbons, lettering and a wreath motif running throughout.  To keep things colourful but soft, we didn't use any white or cream flowers in the arrangements.  I think this allowed the tones to run gently into each other, creating a rippling rhythm of colour to underpin all the merriment and happiness of the day.