Recycled wedding flowers don’t necessarily conjure up dreamy ideas, but bear with us. We have a lot of lovely couples coming to us who are looking for a way to put their flowers to good use after their nuptials, and as a pair of gals who try and be eco-friendly where we can we always jump at the chance to give our creations a little bit of a longer life.

So, what can you do with your leftover wedding flowers? Here are a couple of our favourite ways to get another few days out of your arrangements.

Give them away

This is by far the most popular choice when it comes to leftover wedding flowers. Lots of our brides and grooms enjoy offering up their centrepieces as little take home gifts to some of their nearest and dearest. If you’d like to give away some of your flowers at the end of the night just let us know and we’ll make sure to set them up in a way that it’s easy to remove the flowers in a one-er. To add an extra level of fancy (hello, this is your wedding) we can source you the pedestals, vases or jars for you to keep – so you can present them in the best way. This obviously comes at a cost, but you might be surprised at how affordable an option it is.

If you have large instalments you could always provide twine, tape and paper and let people pinch some of their favourite blooms and bundle them into their very own little bouquet at the end of the night. Crafting is cool you guys.

Offer recycled wedding flowers to nursing homes and hospitals

There’s an amazing charity down in England called ‘Floral Angels’ who we’ve been really inspired by recently. Their team of volunteers rounds up flowers from one-off events and transforms them into new bouquets and arrangements for the residents of hospitals and nursing homes. If you’d like to donate your flowers after your wedding please let us know, and we’ll see what we can do to help. We’d especially like to know if there’s a charity close to your heart, to make it feel more personal.

Use leftover wedding flowers as a memorial

So often at big, beautiful celebrations there’s a truly special person missing from the crowd. If one of your best buds has passed away laying your wedding flowers on their grave or memorial spot after the party has ended can be a lovely way to help you feel like they were included in your day, in some small way. As with all of our other suggestions you can always ask us about logistics, and we’ll always help where we can.

Preserve your bouquet

Preserving wedding flowers is becoming more and more popular, with brides or grooms looking for fun new ways to savour a little snip of their favourite day. The simplest way to do this yourself is obviously drying them. Try to keep them in as good a nick as you can (not always possible if you’re throwing them round the dance floor at 2am, but that’s also a great use for your bouquet in our opinions). When you get them home make sure to make sure all the flowers are nice and dry, hang them upside down in a dark place and allow to dry fully for a few weeks. If you want to up your fanciness you can of course look up other ways to preserve your bouquet – some people choose to have them professionally dried and framed, petals captured in jewellery or the whole thing immortalised in a painting.

Compost the remaining flowers

There are no two ways about it, flowers aren’t the most environmentally friendly venture. However, to offset this slightly we always try to compost all our scraps. If you’re green-fingered and fancy doing the same you can easily compost all your wedding flowers to turn them into a lovely product that will eventually give you more flowers. Ah, the life cycle eh? Just remember to remove any tape or wire first.