Changing the Flowers Changes the Look

When I talk to people about their floral designs, whether they are for a wedding or just a floral gift, they often say ~ "I don't need those exact flowers, you can change the flowers to lower the cost". Here it is in a nutshell folks, changing the flowers, changes the look. Changing the flowers changes the texture and often changing the flowers changes the ability to make an arrangement in a certain color theme.  If you could create a very artsy, unique looking arrangement by using common flowers instead of expensive rare ones, everyone would do it, right?

Take the bouquet in the picture below. This bouquet is created with quite a few different flowers such as scabiosa pods, mini calla lilies, spray roses, tea roses, hypericum berries and seeded eucalyptus. If you wanted to make a lower cost version of this bouquet, you probably could change out some of the callas with carnations but the calla lily has a very unusual shape and nothing else, with a lower cost, really would accomplish what the calla accomplishes in this bouquet, which is to give you a rich red flower with a non-round shape.

Take this bouquet below for example. If we needed to lower the cost of this bouquet, we might be able to switch out some of the roses with carnations or added a cost effective flowers such as hydrangea but it would completely change the texture of the bouquet. Take the little yellow balls for example. This bouquet probably had 10 of them and as you can imagine, if you removed them, the bouquet would not be any smaller, it would just miss that cool, interesting pop of yellow in the form of a ball. There is nothing less expensive with that shape and color that will look like craspedia (yes, that is the name of that flower) and although this bouquet is not an expensive one by our standards, it take quite a few different flowers in different colors to give you the desired color mixture and texture. 

I could give you hundreds of examples of how changing the flower changes the color/structure/texture of a design so the take away here needs to be ~ if you go to your florist and show them a photo of what you want your floral design to look like, switching flowers might be a way to save money but it is not the way to go if you want it to look similar to your inspiration photo!