Wedding Inspo from Top Floral Designer Holly Chapple
Bridal bouquets, how to make them special? Holly Heider Chapple, one of the world’s best floral designers, answers the question.
A wedding must have garden roses. Maybe one particular variety has been selected as a signature flower, a keynote for the wedding’s theme and color scheme. What do you combine with that rose – in the bridal bouquet and wherever else it may appear – to make the most of its beauty and value?
Wedding flowers tips & trick by Holly Chapple
“First of all, I think everything looks amazing with garden roses!” So says Holly Chapple, of Holly Heider Chapple Flowers, Hope Flower Farm, and the Chapel Designers collective. But if you really want your garden roses to be the top players in the event – the king and queen of the wedding – one way to do that, she continues, is by combining them with flowers that have a completely different shape.
“You can choose to skip the peonies and ranunculus and instead pair your roses with unique greenery and with things like stock, larkspur, and snapdragons,” Holly suggests. That’s a strategy that lets the roses dominate the design – in part because, from a budget point of view, it may allow you to use more garden roses and fewer of the other flowers.
If, on the other hand, you still prefer to mix garden roses with other round flowers, you can’t go wrong with spray roses, adds Holly. With three to five laterals to a stem, they fill the spaces between bigger flower heads beautifully, with complementary color, texture and form. Some of Holly’s favorites, in the past, have included White Majolica or Jeanine, for white spray roses; hot pink Gem Star; peach Ilsa; and antique, peachy pink Antigua.
Now Alexandra Farms has garden spray roses to choose from: pure white Blanche, blush white Wedding Rosever, golden peach Sahara Sensation, and three elegant Japanese spray roses in the Wabara Collection: Aio Fuga in lavender-tinted pink, Ioli in antique lavender, and dusty pink Sola.
“All of the new spray roses are extraordinary!” says Holly, who saw them as trial varieties on a visit to the farms, a year before they were introduced commercially. “They are providing us with colors and forms that we never had in spray roses before.”
Holly also loves carnations, typically massed together at a lower level below the garden roses, adding depth and texture to a bridal bouquet or any wedding design. Among her favorites: Lege Marrone, a beige carnation, sometimes with pink petals in the center; peach Lizzy; and blush beige Caramel. “Those tones are beautiful with Juliet, Miyabi, Romantic Antike, any of the whites,” says Holly.
