Life happened first
How Briar was born at our own wedding
My husband proposed in Central Park, in New York. No ring and no plan at all. He just asked, completely out of the blue.
I said yes. Then we let nine years go by.
I know. It took a while to kick in.
By the time we finally got married, we had been together for twelve years and had two daughters. On the same day, at the same party, we baptised our youngest. Anyone who knows us knows we’ve always done things in our own way.
It was an intimate celebration, around seventy guests. Family and close friends, the people who had been there for every chapter of those twelve years, each with a story of ours to tell.
A wedding is usually the starting point. Ours was more of a stop halfway down the road, with plenty of miles on the clock and two car seats in the back. The party had to be about that, about everything that had already happened.
So we planned every last detail. After all, we’d had nine years to think about it.
The flowers were the problem.
Everything we were shown seemed to come from the same place. The same catalogue arrangements, the same combinations repeated over and over. The bouquet I kept seeing on Instagram was another bride’s bouquet, at another venue, in another year. Hardly anyone asked us what we liked, or how we wanted the day to feel.
I remember thinking it could have been anyone’s wedding.
Ours wasn’t. It had twelve years of stories behind it and a huge wish for everything to feel light, relaxed and ours.
So I rolled up my sleeves.
I’ve always had a way with flowers and had made plenty of arrangements, but never anything like this. A whole wedding. My own.
We did a lot of research. We saved pictures, selected colours endlessly, sketched the idea again and again until it made sense. Then we went to buy the flowers and put together every piece with the venue in mind, the corners we loved most and the people who would sit at those tables.
I also made my own bouquet, with help from my eldest daughter. Exactly as I had imagined it, because nobody knew it better than I did.
On the day, I looked around and saw us in everything.
It was boho and easygoing, with the lightness of a party among friends, but it never lost that beautiful seriousness a day like this has. The flowers belonged to the venue as if they had grown there. Nothing from a catalogue, nothing from a recipe, nothing off a production line.
The decoration was ours. More than that, we were in it.
That is where Briar started to grow. No name and no plan, a little like that proposal in New York.
The rest came step by step. It began as something we needed ourselves and became the wish to do for others what we hadn’t been able to find for us. Flowers designed for one person, one space and one moment, and no one else.
We called it Briar, the wild rose. The one that grows its own way and doesn’t fit in any catalogue.
Today we do weddings, baptisms, sunsets, corporate events, product launches and more. Each one means something different, and that is what we try to hear before choosing the first flower. The way we work is always the same. The result never repeats itself.
If you’re planning a day of your own and everything you’re shown feels the same, we understand. We’ve been there.
Whenever I read our line, floral design for when life happens, I think of this day. For us, life happened first. The wedding came after.
Planning a moment like this?
We would love to be part of it.