Cheap Wedding Flowers
Tips to cut your floral budget

How on earth do you get hold of cheap wedding flowers for your special day?

A wedding without flowers is pretty much unheard of but once you start to add up the cost of the essential bridal bouquet, attendants posies, church flowers and hugely costly table centerpieces, budgets soon start to spiral out of control.

But there are many ways to save money as we show you here:

Flowers - Cheap Wedding Ideas

• Make your own wedding flowers.

  DIY offers the cheapest wedding flowers but most of us are not great artists and there is a real skill in designing and arranging flowers not to mention having the knowledge to keep your flowers fresh.

  Wedding Flowers at Wholesale Prices
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  But pop along to your local church on a Sunday morning and ask who does the church flower arrangements. Most churches have a team of volunteers who "do the church flowers" and many ladies are retired, love weddings and will be only too willing to help. Just ask!

  I was very lucky and had ALL my flowers done DIY by a lady from the church who happened to be the best friend of my mother in law to be. The cost = zero: a wedding gift!

• Choose artifical wedding flowers

  Great for weddings abroad or for matching colors when fresh flowers are out of season. You can also reuse some of the flowers afterwards and silk flowers look incredibly stylish too.

• Use a florist for essential flowers only

  You want your bridal bouquet to be amazing and sometimes only an experienced florist will do but you can get creative and do some simple table centerpieces yourself or enlist friends and relatives (or even your church flower lady!) to help.

• Use flower arranging students

  Pop down to your local college and find out what flower arranging classes are available. See if anyone there would like to gain experience by sorting out your wedding flowers.

  You might even find a course you want to do yourself and save even more money!

NEW Illustrated step by step guide to creating your own wedding flowers.

More creative wedding ideas for flowers

Before you get carried away in looking at gorgeous blooms in flower catalogues and florist showrooms, think about the DESIGN of your flowers first.

For example, if you are short (like me!), you will look silly with an enormous round bridal bouquet. A small, v shaped delicate bouquet (see picture above) will be far more appropriate and cost far less!

Make sure you only choose flowers that are in SEASON. If not you could end up with a huge wedding flower bill. Peonies for example are very expensive as they are only available in May.

ARTIFICIAL wedding flowers.

Consider using alternatives to fresh wedding flowers.

A bouquet of feathers or a simple yet exotic candle, for example, could be perfect options depending on the theme of your wedding.

If you do use a florist, make sure you ask for the minimum and maximum prices of each flower type before you start designing bouquets and centerpieces.

You can then cut costs by taking out one or two flowers. Believe me, some individual blooms can cost $20 or more so it's important to understand how your flower budget is building up.

If you do decide to go DIY or use others to help, then there are plenty of ways to source cheap bulk wedding flowers to get good discounts. See our related pages for details.

Tip: Use cheaper "look-a-like" flowers in place of more expensive options

Check out our popular flower names page for other ideas on replacing costly flower varieties with cheap wedding flowers which look just as good.