I don't really care much about flowers. Sure, they're nice, but I'd rather have them in a garden than in my hand. I like having decorative dried roses at home. I adore wearing fabric flowers on hats and as brooches. On the extremely rare occasions someone (oddly enough, not Thomas ...) has sent me a floral arrangement, I've been very pleased to have the flowers around the house. I even dig flower print fabric. But that's about the limit of my personal associations with flowers.

So choosing a florist/floral designer for our wedding was somewhat daunting. In fact, for a while I was thinking we'd do without flowers entirely. We could use candles for centerpieces and other decorations, and me and the female attendants wouldn't carry bouquets down the aisle. Bouquets are silly and affected, an archaic tradition without any real meaning in this modern world -- really, who walks around carrying a bunch of flowers in front of them? It's unnatural and stagey. Besides, why spend all that money on something people see for just a few minutes anyways?

But somewhere along the line I started thinking a bouquet would like pleasingly wedding-y. What are the major signifiers of "The Bride" in Western culture? A white dress, a veil, and a bouquet of flowers. I don't want to be a cliche "Bride," but at the same time I want some token representation of that cultural rite of passage (note: I'm putting my frustrated grad. school career to work picking apart wedding symbolism ;-). I want to be obviously "The Bride" but not so obviously that it looks like I'm playing a culturally prescribed part.

This is a very thin line to walk, and, in ways both great and small, Thomas and I have been trying to keep on that narrow path for our wedding. We don't want cliches; we want things that mean something to us personally. Our wedding needs to be an incarnation of our own unique relationship and outlook on life, yet in some few ways we choose to align ourselves with the prevailing view of weddings in the Western world.

So, uh, back to the flowers. Carrying a bouquet signifies me as "The Bride," and in a way that I now personally approve of, mostly because it will make a lovely picture. Aesthetics can be just as important as cultural signification, y'know. I considered a few craft at-home options for a bouquet -- dried, silk, or fabric flowers that I make up beforehand. But again aesthetics prevailed. Fresh flowers are really pretty, and I like that look better than other flower options.

The big downside is that fresh flowers for a wedding seem to be hideously expensive. Really, these things die, and fast too, so why should we spend over $1,000 on 'em?? The wedding food is short-lived, but everyone at the party gets to eat it. The flowers are seen for a few hours -- and not well and not by everyone -- and then they're just more trash to clear away.

The one area where flowers might be of genuine use is for the ceremony room. We need some kind of screen or pillars or draping or something to cover up the ugly back wall behind us during the ceremony. But it can't be too expensive -- the ceremony is only one hour out of the whole event.

So, in the past six weeks or so, we met with three floral designers, and I talked to three more on the phone. Have I mentioned that wedding flowers are disgustingly expensive? It's even more disgusting when you don't particularly care about flowers. Most places want $150 for a bride's bouquet, regardless if you tell them you want a small, simple, nosegay style and adamantly don't want a giant cascade. Bridesmaid bouquets are less than half the cost of the bride's, even though you tell them you want the bouquets all about the same size. Even a tiny little boutonniere is $7 to $12. And don't even get me started about the site decorations!

Luckily, the first floral designers we talked to turned out to be the best and most affordable. She works out of her home and charges about a third less than the rest of them. Even more important, she had tons of ideas and props suitable for making the ceremony room perfectly lovely. So one more thing's off the checklist now!