Ever wonder what makes the difference between beautiful wedding flowers, and a wedding-day embarassment?  Much of what determines the beauty of your wedding flowers happens before they arrive at our shop.  Proper handling, especially temperature and hydration, are essential to flower quality.  We took a field trip to one of our local wholesalers on the Sunday after Thanksgiving to show you some of what steps our wholesalers take to ensure we can deliver high quality flowers to you.  You can visit the photo gallery on our everyday flower blog at http://floristblogs.com/photos/bloomery/category1009.aspx.

BW Wholesale is located in Pittsburgh's famed Strip District, but is open only to retail florists.

In one corner of our shop, we have shelves of wedding accessories, topped with photos of brides holding bouquets.  From time to time, we’re asked if those are real brides.  All eight photos are pictures of actual brides whose weddings we created.  Some of the photos we took, and some were taken by our friend Diane Maxwell at DLM Photography.

For the single guys who don’t catch on real quick—they’re brides; no they’re not single anymore.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an article earlier this week about brides taking their groom's name after they married (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05311/601902.stm).  For a number of years, the percentage of brides changing their name declined, but recently, the trend has reversed.

According to the study conducted in 2004 by Harvard University researchers, the fraction of white, college graduates in Massachusetts who kept their maiden names decreased from 21 percent to 13 percent from 1990 to 2000.

And in a poll last spring from the wedding planning Web site TheKnot.com, 81 percent of those surveyed said they would take their husband's name -- up from 71 percent in 2000.

Granted, The Knot's study is not very scientific, and Harvard's seems pretty limited in scope, but the numbers are probably within acceptable error of one another.  In our case, The Bloomery's owner changed her name after several years of marriage, and only so the last names on their passports matched when travelling internationally.  We're located in her hometown, and many people in the area know her or her family (so many people that her groom, who moved here from another state, used to joke about changing his name instead).

We don't have any advice--it's a personal decision in every case, and each bride has different considerations.  The modern groom should be understanding of his bride's choice, whichever way she chooses, and respect her reasons for doing so.  Which is a great segue into another topic.

Clergy have long felt that it's not the wedding per se that matters, but the marriage.  However, marriage educators have recently begun to feel that the process of planning a wedding is not only good practice for a marriage, but can actually predict the success of the marriage.  Planning a wedding, as you no doubt know, is an invitation to conflict.  The basic indicator for a successful marriage is how the couple interacts with each other, and with each other's family; in short, how those inevitable conflicts are resolved:

Successful couples are those who know how to discuss their differences in ways that actually strengthen their relationship and improve intimacy.  Successful couples don't let their disagreements contaminate the rest of the relationship. (http://www.smartmarriages.com/divorcepredictor.html)

To quote Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!"  For more information along these lines, you can visit Smart Marriages at http://www.smartmarriages.com/.

Fall weddings have become more and more popular in recent years, and one of the main reasons is because of the dramatic colors of the leaves at this time of year.  This is one of the better years for leaf-watchers in terms of splendor--brilliant golds, blazing reds and oranges, all brought on by a hot and dry August.  Sadly, the weather these past two weeks has been miserable.  Mid 40's and raining, and this weekend (when it seems the leaves are at their peal) doesn't look any better.  We're located about 35 miles north of Pittsburgh; we saw our first frost last week, and had some sort of sleet/slush on the lawn and cars this morning.  That's a shame, because dramatic foliage is one of the things wedding photographers salivate over, and we florists love because the bouquets are so much more striking.  Moral of the story: have a "Plan B" for wedding photographs and anything involving the outdoors at this time of year.  You just never know.

<update>

Record snowfall today in areas east and south of Pittsburgh, thousands without power.  And Halloween isn't even here yet.  More at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05298/594632.stm.

Today, we suffered a website and e-mail outage for several hours for both www.bloomery.com and www.bloomeryweddings.com.  Our servers are housed in Boca Raton, FL, which got pounded pretty heavily by Wilma.  Currently, our websites are back online and e-mail is fully functional, but as that area recovers, we may face intermittant outages.  We appreciate the work our hosting company, Applied Innovations, has done to keep all their clients online, and feel very lucky that the major data pipes from that area did not suffer considerable damage.  If you can't reach us via e-mail, you can call us at 800-729-1711 (724-285-1711 locally).  We appreciate your patience and understanding, and please include in your thoughts all the people in the areas affected by this year's tragic hurricane season.

September's featured bouquet is a colorful mix of red roses, orange spray roses, mini sunflowers, fuschia stock, purple statice, hypericum berries and wheat.  This hand-tied bouquet was tied with a white stem wrap and a subtle white bow.  Estimated price $60-$80.

Yikes!  It's the middle of October, and we're a little behind on our favorite bouquets.  August is a tough month to pick only one featured bouquet, because we made a number of gorgeous bouquets, all of them different.  However, our featured bouquet for August 2005 is a strikingly colorful handtied bouquet of lime green cymbidium orchids, Mango mini calla lilies, and hot pink roses.  The stems were partially wrapped with a simple white ribbon and a row of pearl-headed pins down one side.  The approximate price is $140-$160.

Time has an article on the rise of "groomzillas" at http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1109319,00.html.  In a few weddings, we've seen the grooms take a more active role, but the spa trend hasn't really worked its way into our area yet.

When the Socirty of American Florists has an Outstanding Varieties competition, they're not kidding when they say "outstanding".  Dozens of growers brought hundreds of gerbera daisies, roses, alstromeria, lilies, and more to Lake Las Vegas last week, and we were impressed.  As promised, we'll be posting photos of some of our favorites.

Our first favorite was a brilliant orange rose named "Valentine" (we're not sure why they named it such).  This variety, from Koch California Ltd, won a Red Ribbon for standard roses, and features a vibrant orange petal with dark green foliage.  Orange by itself is not a popular color for weddings, but as part of a fall wedding, this rose would be outstanding.  The high petal count gives this rose a large head with a very classic profile from the top and side.