A Green Wedding Bouquet

On Saturday we went to my son's friend's wedding.  They incorporated a lot of unique and creative ideas into their wedding - many of them environmentally-friendly.  One of the things that I was looking forward to seeing at their wedding was the flowers because I had read about the concept behind the florist and loved the idea. 

The bouquets were made by a one-woman business in Toronto called My Luscious Backyard. The woman who owns My Luscious Backyard, Sarah Nixon, grows organic flowers in residential back and front yards around Toronto.  It is a win-win situation as she gets the use of many small plots of land scattered around her neighbourhood to grow the flowers she uses to make beautiful fresh bouquets for offices, dinner parties, and weddings.  In return the owners of the plots of land have beautiful intensely-planted flower gardens to enjoy, maintained by someone else.  
My Luscious Backyard is a part of a new wave of urban farming, known as SPIN - small plot intensive farming.  SPIN farming is gaining in popularity in cities across North America as a result of the eat local movement.  Growing flowers for a local market is a natural extension of the intensive urban vegetable gardens.  I had never heard of anything like this, but am captivated by the ingenuity of this unique urban land use.  Have you heard of SPIN farming in your area?  
According to Sarah, the bouquets are best for people who are willing to be flexible about what flowers are used.  When flowers bloom depends on the season and on mother nature and can therefore be hard to predict.  The advantage of a small local business is that in addition to the usual flowers, sometimes non-traditional flowers can be used in the bouquets creating a unique look.
Sarah has gone out of her way to create an environmentally-friendly florist company. The flowers are:

• grown organically
• germinated in coconut husks  rather than "unsustainable" peat moss
• arranged in vintage or locally-made vases rather than using flower foam (which is not biodegradable) 
• wrapped in minimal packaging 
• grown locally so they haven't used a lot of fossil fuels getting to their destination
• tended, harvested, and delivered locally by Sarah using a bicycle with an attached trailer

The colours at the wedding we attended were purple, orange, and green.  You can see the bridesmaid's bouquets in the photos below.  The bridesmaids wore purple dresses (each one was different as the attendants were free to pick their own dress as long as it was purple) and their bouquets contained orange dahlias, white flowers and green berries.  I'm not up on the names of all the flowers used, but as you can see they were gorgeous.

The bride's bouquet was a little larger than the bridesmaids' and was tied with a trailing white ribbon.  In addition to the orange dahlias, the white flowers, and green berries, her bouquet also had lovely purple alstroemerias to tie in with the bridesmaids' dresses.  

Stay tuned for tomorrow as I'm posting more of their wedding ideas as well as how the couple met - it is seriously one of the best "how we got together" stories.