I love, love, love, this bouquet created early this spring for my bride Allison. The photograph was taken by the amazing Kate Headley.

For years I have designed exactly as my bride requested, and I have developed a fabulous skill for being able to follow the leader or in this instance the bride. I can do exactly as my bride wants or follow a picture to perfection. This is an important ability I need to have to fulfill the desires of this type of bride and don't get me wrong I am happy to do this type of designing if that is what you truly want.  My issue with this is I want to make you, your bridal bouquet, when we pull a picture from my old images or from a magazine I am making you someone else's bridal bouquet.  When a bride sees something she likes in my portfolio, I now say "ok but lets change it just enough to make it your bridal bouquet…"

One other type of bride I am running into more and more is the bride that says to me " Holly I trust you, just be creative". As an artist I have to say that just makes my heart sing, it means I am designing without handcuffs or shackles. People ask me all the time "how do you design" and the reality is, the flowers speak to me. I can clearly look at a blossom and see exactly which direction and place it is supposed to go in an arrangement or a bouquet.  When I am trying to duplicate a design, I am often having to force a stem where it may not naturally want to go. Does that make sense? If I listen to my inner voice that says "put that blossom here", the pieces are invariably more terrific. We have been published quite a bit lately, YAY!!!  I have noticed that the designs that are chosen or published are the bouquets of my creation, the bouquets where I was not confined, but allowed to design. 

The above bouquet was created with blue hydrangea, blue thistle, blue viburnum berry, purple lilac, aggapanthus, blue muscari, blue hyacinthus, blue delphinium, dusty miller, seeded euc, purple anemones, and monkshood.  The contracted description for this bridal bouquet was for a strictly all blue bouquet. Five to six of the above ingredients were not to be a part of this extraordinary design. 2 days before the wedding, lovely, wonderful, Allison said "I trust you and oh, BTW those pretty purple flowers at the end of your driveway are really beautiful, so please use them if you think they will look nice ".  Can you imagine how incredibly different this bouquet would have been if I had not been given creative freedom. It was the purple, and my freedom, that made this blue bouquet rock…