Wedding Flowers Done Right: The Inside Scoop After 16 years

How DID Cherfold Flowers manage to get it so right in just 16 years?

“We had the most wonderful day filled with so much love and laughter!! Your flowers were absolutely amazing and survived the heat!! My house is full of them still …I keep changing the water. Anyway …thank you so much … Lucy looked beautiful and so happy. Everyone said it was the best wedding!!”

(Jane, MoB, July 2026)

Every heartfelt comment that I receive such as the one above (and I’m delighted to say that today I rarely get anything but glowing reviews) fills me with an enormous sense of pride. My goal is to make every bride’s special day even more memorable by genuinely creating the ‘oooh’ factor through my flowers.

As Cherfold Flowers celebrates its 16th birthday this week, I am thinking about how it all started to fall into place; when I started to get it so right.

It hasn’t always been beautiful bouquets and happy couples though. I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way - some costly, some stressful, one that still gives me nightmares! Here’s what they taught me:

The gap between what she wanted and what I thought she wanted

One of my very first weddings taught me a lesson I still think about. It was a spring wedding and I’d added greenery throughout to pad out the flowers as that was my look back then, lush and full.

Turns out the bride hadn’t wanted any greenery at all. I got called back to the venue and asked to strip out as much of it as I could before the ceremony. That was a stressful morning!

It wasn’t that I hadn’t listened — I’d filled in the gaps of the brief with my own assumptions about what would look good instead of actually checking. Big early lesson in the difference between my instincts and my client’s vision. I listen a lot more actively to a brief now.

Growing my own flowers sounded romantic, but unfortunately the numbers didn’t add up

I started out growing flowers on my own half-acre plot, with big plans to expand and make wedding flowers myself, start to finish. It felt like the purest version of what I wanted to do — flowers I’d nurtured from seed through to being arranged into someone’s wedding day.

What I realised was that growing flowers properly is a full-time job by itslef. I couldn’t do the growing and the arranging and run the admin side of the business, so I took someone on to help with the growing. However, I ended up paying them more than I was earning - not the best business model! To make the sums work, I’d have had to charge so much per stem that no wedding budget would ever have stretched to it.

It was a difficult lesson to learn, to recognise the gap between what feels meaningful and what’s actually sustainable. I still love growing flowers — I learnt it couldn’t underpin my business, and now I happily benefit from all the wonderful growers out there.

I tried to ‘crack’ London, but I soon gave up on that idea

Early on I was determined to take on London weddings. I thought that it would feel like the mark of success — bigger venues, bigger budgets and a bigger name for Cherfold Flowers.

What I hadn’t taken fully into consideration was actually getting there: the parking, congestion charges, sitting in traffic for hours before a wedding had even started. The stress wasn’t worth it. So I stopped trying to make London work and focused instead on venues a little over an hour from where I lived.

Sometimes the lesson isn’t push harder. It’s stop pushing in the wrong direction.

The morning I drove off without the buttonholes

This is the one that still gives me nightmares!

I got to the venue, unloaded everything I thought I needed, and drove off — only to realise, once I was already too far away to turn back, that all the buttonholes were still sitting in the back of the van.

No time to get back before the ceremony. I managed to get them to the reception in time for the official photos, but the groomsmen went into the church with nothing. Not catastrophic, but it’s the kind of thing that sits with you precisely because it was totally avoidable. I really did feel awful.

Now I triple-check everything - every time - no matter how many weddings I’ve done. Still do a final check before I drive away from every single one — I never want to experience that feeling again.

I’ve fallen out of love with the huge, dramatic structures

For a long time I thought bigger meant better — vast floral arches, sprawling installations, the kind of thing that makes a big impact in photos. And there’s definitely a place for that.

But the older I get, the more I love the less dramatic wedding. I’m no longer chasing the huge structures I might once have said yes to without a second thought.

Part of it’s practical — flowers are expensive, and huge structures mean large amounts of waste once the day’s over, which - from a sustainability point of view - matters more to me now than it used to . Part of it is simply knowing myself better — understanding what kind of florist I actually want to be, rather than what I thought “successful” was supposed to look like. Saying no to the big ‘showy’ jobs has taught me as much as saying yes to the right ones. Now I like to think of myself as the “River Cafe” of the wedding floristry world - beautiful ingredients simply done.

And a few key takeaways, while we’re at it!

Not everything needs a full explanation. Some are just bite-sized, hard-won insights from sixteen years of weddings:

• Always pack a spare pair of snips — you will, at some point, drop one in the bin

• Hair straighteners are the secret to creased ribbons

• Be prepared to stay through part of the ceremony to fix or move things on site

• Don’t assume people know what buttonholes are — someone once tried to attach cake flowers

• Gently suggest to couples ahead of time that taking hired vases into the bridal suite after the wedding isn’t the greatest idea — it’s almost impossible to collect the morning after when everyone’s still sleeping!

• The wildflower look everyone loves right now may need tweaking during a heatwave — delicate, loose blooms don’t always hold up in extreme heat

• Don’t assume a postcode alone will get you to the venue — satnavs can lead you astray, especially somewhere rural

Still in love, sixteen years on!

Through all of it — the costly mistakes, the stressful realisations, the mornings that didn’t go to plan - I’m still completely obsessed with colour and texture. I still get butterflies every single time the flower deliveries arrive for a wedding.

More recently, I have added something new: I’ve started painting and I’m studying for an MA in Creative Practice. This past week I have sold two paintings — both as a wedding anniversary gift, fittingly — and I plan to do a lot more of that. No idea where this next chapter will take me, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

To every couple who’s trusted me with their wedding flowers, every venue and fellow supplier along the way, and everyone who’s cheered me on — thank you from the bottom of my heart.