The couples getting married in summer send me their mood boards in October. It is the sanest thing anybody does — eight or nine months out, nothing locked, everything still possible. And almost every one of those boards has peonies on it. I answer gently, because a conversation about summer wedding flowers is mostly a conversation about heat, and heat is the one vendor at your wedding who will not take direction.
The Peony Problem
Peonies in the United States bloom in May and early June. That is the window for domestic field-grown stems, and it closes before most of the summer calendar has opened. So when someone asks me for peonies in late July, I am not sourcing from a field in Oregon. I am sourcing from Alaska.
Alaskan peonies run mid-June through August, and the reason is latitude. Cool nights keep the buds from rushing, and the long daylight builds thicker stems and heavier heads than you get further south. It is a genuinely strange and useful piece of agriculture — the state that gets everything last becoming the one that fills the gap when the rest of the country is finished. Southern Hemisphere growers cover what is left of the year.
Worth knowing, though: peonies bruise. The petals mark under your thumb, and they mark worse in heat. I will build with them in August. I will not hand one to a flower girl at two in the afternoon.
What Summer Wedding Flowers Are Actually Doing in July
Dahlias take ninety to a hundred days from planting to the first flower, which is why the early varieties only start opening in mid-to-late July. August and September are the peak, and they run until a hard frost blackens the foliage — which here is close to an abstraction, so ours go long.
If your date is late August, you are in dahlia weather, and I would take that over a forced peony every time. A café au lait dahlia the width of my palm does something a peony does not: it holds its shape under a tent at four in the afternoon. Garden roses are good all summer as well, with one caveat. In heat they open fast. A rose that looked tight and architectural on the studio bench Friday morning will be fully blown by the toast. So I buy them tighter in July than I would in January — a small adjustment that is the whole difference between the photographs you pictured and the ones you get.
The Hydrangea Conversation
Hydrangeas wilt because of arithmetic. Those big leaves are a large evaporation surface, and the moment water leaves the plant faster than the stem can draw it up, the flower goes soft. Trials have found that stripping the foliage adds roughly a day and a half of vase life and all but eliminates the wilting. There is also a resin the stem seals itself with at the cut, closing the door on the water it needs; a few seconds of the cut end in boiling water clears it.
None of which saves a bouquet carried through three hours of ninety-degree sun. If a hydrangea does collapse, submerge the whole head in tepid water for half an hour and it will come back — it inflates, visibly, like something being filled. That is a studio trick, not an aisle one. For anything leaving water I build with orchids, callas, carnations or dahlias, and I keep hydrangeas in the centerpieces, where there is a vase.
A Note About June
May and June are the cloudiest months on this coast. The marine layer drifts in overnight and usually burns off between mid-morning and early afternoon, which means an eleven o'clock ceremony in Malibu and a four o'clock one are two different weddings in two different lights. If you are choosing for June, choose for grey. White goes flat under that sky and cream does not. The palette that holds in soft marine light is not the palette that holds at four in the afternoon in August, and nobody tells couples this until it is the morning of.
If your date is next summer and you are only now gathering pictures, you are early in the best way. Come by the studio, or find the Flower Van on Abbot Kinney on a Saturday and look at what came in that week. It is the fastest way I know to learn what you actually like, as distinct from what photographs well on somebody else's board.
