Cattleya Orchids!

Cattleya orchids - absolutely stunning! You don't see them often anymore, but at one time the cattleya was the most elegant and romantic wedding flower. These were grown by Peterkort Roses and beautifully arranged by Lois at The Garden Path. Congratulations to Nicole the bride! Beautiful choice for your wedding bouquet.

I Love the Portland Flower Market

Early to rise on Flower Market day! I like to leave early enough to miss the traffic and be back to the shop in time for morning deliveries. The flower market always inspires me - and today the sales staff at Billingsley Wholesale gave me the (unofficial) award for prettiest selections of the day. I can't wait to start creating beautiful wedding arrangements out of them! Check in later this week to see what we do with the pretty red flowers I bought today.

Amazing Lace

Here's one more dried flower arrangement. This one, created by Dena, was inspired by the beautiful Queen Anne's Lace - perfectly dried along with the blue hydrangea in silica gel. This piece is being donated to the Give A Little Foundation, a local foundation supporting local people with small grants to help them get back on their feet. Their fundraiser "Amazing Lace" is September 18 and 19 at McMinnville's historic First Baptist Church.

I Love Dried Flowers

I love working with dried flowers! I love the smell; I love the textures and variety; I love the colors. They are definitely getting harder to find though. Some of these were dried by us and some were purchased from the wholesale market. I think they are not as in-fashion as they once were so fewer places are carrying them. And they really are not "everlasting". They deteriorate over time - especially when pawed through on market shelves!
This piece is on its way to a private dining nook at McMenamin's Hotel Oregon. The McMenamins establishments are always a bit quirky, so being "in-fashion" is not necessarily their cup of tea (or more precisely their glass of Terminator ale).
Just as a side note: my first flower shop was located in the Hotel Oregon in the pre-McMenamins days. I loved being downtown, but I also love my present busy site. And McMenamins has infused a whole new energy into downtown McMinnville. It's a win/win!

Wedding Networking Event

Here are a few more shots from an event at Youngberg Hill a few weeks ago.
This is the event where we went "all local" on the flowers. All flowers and greens came from within 15 miles of the venue and of the shop. It was fun! Many flowers came from 4-T Acres, commercial flower growers near Dayton. Others came from my gardens and - I confess - roadside ditches. (That would be the wild Queen Anne's Lace. It's having its best year ever thanks to the wet spring and summer.)
Thank you to the wonderful Continuum Photography for the beautiful photos.

Hot Summer Wedding

Carolyn's color palette was from the warm creams through peach and orangey shades and into a strong red. Good summer colors! For her bouquet she stayed in the creamy and peachy tones - a beautiful compliment to her hair and complexion. Carolyn and her mom Linda were wonderful to work with.

The centerpieces tended more toward the red shades, featuring some of the lovely garden roses Carolyn loves so much. The Romantik Antike rose above opens just like a peony. So beautiful!

Temperatures in the mid 90's and a strong breeze made it a tough day to be a flower. A few tricks of the trade helped them get through the day. The arch detail above features the beautiful Piano Frieland rose with red dahlias, white dendrobiums and a charming gloriosa lily.

My New Favorite Rose?

This just might be my new favorite rose - Piano grown by Peterkort Roses. It's a peony type garden rose with a delightful subtle fragrance. Sandra at Peterkort says that garden roses are very popular this year! You have to appreciate a rose with giant thorns all up the stem! Look for this and other garden roses in Dave and Carolyn's wedding at Youngberg Hill Vineyard and Inn this weekend. Hopefully the thorns are staying on the design room floor!

Free Bridal Bouquet

The Garden Path has a deal for couples getting married in Oregon Wine Country in 2011 (or even later this year). Book your future wedding flowers with The Garden Path this month, our 15th birthday month, and you may get your bridal bouquet for free! If your flowers total more than $500 (and that's easy!), we'll provide a $100 wedding bouquet at no charge to you. It's an offer that doesn't come around often, but you need to complete your reservation by the end of August. That doesn't mean we need to finalize all the details. Just get your reservation in, and we can fill in the blanks - exact colors, number of corsages, etc. - later if you wish. Call us for a consultation time.

Networking at Youngberg Hill

How gorgeous is this as a place to get married? Youngberg Hill Vineyard and Inn is a working vineyard with eight guest rooms in the inn. And a wedding-day view you will never forget!

It was the site of our July meeting of Wine Country Wedding Professionals. Absolutely delicious tasty treats were provided by Virginia Murphy and staff of Cafe Uncorked. I could have made a full meal of the hazelnut custard topped with fresh local raspberries!

The flower arrangements were provided by The Garden Path. It was a fun and creative process. We pulled the containers from our personal collections of vases, and used only completely reusable mechanics (no wet foam!). All flowers were held in place by their own stems, or by glass frogs or metal pin holders. (Remember them?)
The flowers were "all local" - coming from within 15 miles of the venue. It was a trip back to my flower-arranging roots - back to the days when I used almost exclusively flowers from my own yard and gardens.
Many new contacts were made, and a wonderful afternoon was had by all.
Thank you, Continuum Photography, for the beautiful photos. There is nothing like pro shots to show off the site, food and flowers!

It's Our Birthday!

August 1995 to August 2010.
We're 15 years old!

We're celebrating our birthday this month, and invite you to join us. Find us on Facebook, and become a fan of The Garden Path. All during August, there will be weekly Facebook specials - one of which will be a dozen roses at the 1995 price of $40!
We also invite everyone to stop into the shop and enter our drawing. Someone in our local delivery area will win a beautiful bouquet of flowers each month for a year. Just drop your name into the bowl at the counter. We'll draw the name of the lucky winner at the end of the month. We also have a very special offer for wedding couples. You might get a FREE wedding bouquet. Call the shop for details and to see if your wedding will qualify.
Happy Birthday to Us!

Wedding at Kelty Estate

Kelty Estate in the little town of Lafayette was the perfect setting for Rachel and Robert's vintage themed wedding. It is a lovely old home turned Bed and Breakfast, located in the heart of Oregon's Wine Country.

Rachel's favorite flower, the peony, was brought in from Holland. But the roses, sweet peas, succulents, Kent Beauty oregano - and even the baby's breath - came from nearby growers. You can imagine how wonderful it smelled! Take a look at the handkerchief detail in her bouquet











The estate's shady backyard garden served as the ceremony site, with vows being said under the iron arch.
Reception tables were set up on the front lawn with these cute little birdnests as the centerpieces. It was a beautiful day, and I hope everyone had a great time!

Monica's Cool Blue Wedding

The campus of Linfield College was once again the backdrop for a summer wedding. I thought Monica's cool blue shades were the perfect counterpoint for the hot day. We tucked the arch into the shade to protect the flowers from the heat. It was later moved to the head of the aisle and vows were said under the arch.
Monica's bouquet used blue hydrangea, lady's mantle and nigella from our gardens. Nigella is also known as love-in-a-mist. Great name for a wonderful little flower! (Some people are familiar with it's seed pod, used a lot in dried flower arrangements. When dried, it's know as old-man-in-a-beard!)

Kristin's Garden Wedding

The rain finally cleared and Kristin had a beautiful sunny day for her wedding in her dad's garden. The garden was lovely, and featured some of the same local flowers that I had used in Kristin's bouquets.
There was a bit of a vintage theme, brought out in the use of her grandmother's handkerchiefs. Kristin told me she remembered wrapping her dolls in these hankies when she was little. What a nice way to bring fond memories of Grandma to your wedding day!
In addition to an all-natural garden look, Kristin's inspiration was the colors of the sunset. She loved the idea of pods and berries mixed in. I was especially excited about finding the sea holly and the scabiosa seed heads. You can see both in the bridal bouquet. And - yes - that's another handkerchief in the bridal bouquet!
One of the unique things about Kristin's wedding is that our first meeting was only three days before the wedding! It was all done via pictures and through her wedding coordinator. She was really happy that we had hit her look so right on!

Peony Season!

Gail created this charming piece in a ceramic dish to celebrate peony season. Oregon-grown peonies are beautiful!
Unfortunately, local peony season is coming to a close. They're a prized wedding flower (currently "in vogue") and will continue to be available imported from outside the local area. We love them wherever they come from, but feel especially blessed to live where we have access to such lovely locally-grown flowers.

A New Tradition?

Orchid leis are becoming a must-have for local high school graduations. I know this tradition is imported from Hawaii where leis are layered many deep for special days. Is this something that is happening elsewhere - or just on the West Coast?
We have leis available for graduations this weekend. They're made from white orchids and sonia orchids (a purple/white bicolor) - and are really beautiful!

For many years I have created large garden bouquets for the graduation ceremony at Linfield College. I believe it's my favorite job of the entire year! (And the bonus this year was watching my daughter graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing.)

Some of these flowers came from my own garden. The foxglove is almost a tradition in these arrangements since it seems to bloom for full show on graduation day. The tall irises and hot pink centranthus are also from my yard.

This was the second showing for these pieces, having been used the previous evening for the Baccalaureate Service. It rained for the Commencement, but no one expected otherwise from the rainiest Oregon spring in years. The flowers didn't mind the rain, and the graduates and guests all brought umbrellas!

Here's a close-up of last weekend's bridal bouquet, "hot pinks" ordered by the bride's mom. For this wedding we did only the bridal bouquet and the groom's boutonniere, and it came in at a very affordable $80. You can spend a bundle if you want, but you don't have to!

I love the greenhouse-forced hydrangeas we're seeing now. However, being from the greenhouse, they're not as hardy as those from the garden centers.

I've had good luck transplanting them to my yard, but I do baby them a bit. After the first blooms fade, I transplant them into a large enough pot so their roots have room to stretch. The pot goes into a shady outdoors spot where I can give it lots of water. By this fall or next spring the new roots will be established enough to plant into a shady or semi-shady spot in the ground. Hydrangeas are thirsty plants, so be sure to give them plenty of water during their first years in the garden.

2009 Weddings in Review

With a thank you to Tracy at Park Place Design for the idea, I'm posting a couple of collages of the past season's wedding work. It was an exciting year for us in the shop, with fun wedding venues and brides with great ideas!
Green and green with variations was clearly one of the trends of the year. Hydrangeas, green orchids and bells of Ireland found places in many of our designs.
Surprisingly, the other trend we noticed was a return to very traditional bouquets. Red and white roses and white calla lilies were very popular - with occasional black accents thrown in.
We're looking forward to another successful season.