Green Wedding with Eco-friendly Flowers

If you want a green wedding, you have to be mindful of your impact to the environment in all aspects of your wedding including wedding invitations, wedding gown and attire, food, wedding favors and even your floral decorations and bouquets.

At the first glance, wedding flowers hardly seem impact the eco-system negatively - after all they grow naturally. But when you look at how they are grown, how they are packed and transported to your wedding locale and how they are disposed off, you will see the need to handle them in an eco-friendly manner.

Here is what you must know about having eco-friendly wedding flowers at your wedding.

• Not all flowers are grown in an eco-friendly manner. Some nurseries or farms use a lot of synthetic pesticides and insecticides that are extremely harmful to the soil and environment. Organic flowers are grown in a sustainable manner using earth-friendly pesticides and fertilizers. Their farming practices are USDA certified. They should be your first choice for eco-friendly wedding flowers. But they can be expensive. Other labels like 'eco-friendly', 'socially responsible', 'Veriflora', 'Fair Trade' indicate varying degrees of green farming practices and social responsibility towards compensating the farmers adequately. Select your wedding flowers with one of these labels for a green wedding.

• A green wedding should use eco-friendly packaging for food and flowers. Your wedding flowers could be coming from across the continent and will use preservative coolants and plastic sleeves and covers. Bio-degradable coolants, recycled plastics and cardboard make eco-friendly replacements for conventional packaging materials.

• Preferably use seasonal flowers and have them delivered from local farms. This cuts down the need for long term preservation.

• Choose organza and other decorations for your bouquets and floral table-tops carefully - use items made from natural fibers like silk, cotton, cork, hemp, bamboo, etc. and recycled materials.

• See if you can reuse the flowers - use ceremony decorations at the reception or dance floor. This will save the environment and save you money too!

• Let a portion of the flowers come from artificial floral decorations. You can get very real-looking flowers made of renewable materials like paper or silk.

• After your wedding, donate your eco-friendly wedding flowers to a hospital or nursing home.

• When you discard the bouquets and decorations that after the wedding, separately dispose parts like plastic and papers that can be recycled and the organic waste from wilted flowers.

• Wherever you can, you potted flowering plants instead of cut flowers. This cuts down the need for packaging and proper disposal of the floral wastes.

Revel in your commitment to go green and let your eco-friendly wedding flowers set an example for other to follow.