I had a small wedding, and knew that I wanted to splurge on the flowers, which was easier as I didn't need many arrangements. I loved the look of garden roses, so I decided to use a couple of colors and some greenery and that's it. I choose pink antique and creamy peony, 3 dozen of each. They didn't have the greenery that I wanted at this time of year, but I had seen it at a local bargain grocery store, so I decided to just order the roses and buy my seeded eucalyptus from the store. Fiftyflowers was very easy to work with and gave me excellent advice about when to arrange delivery (I thought I would want more time than they suggested, but they were exactly right. Everything opened up beautifully.) A day or two before delivery, they called to tell me that the creamy peony roses wouldn't be optimal, so they offered to substitute David Austen Patience roses, also ivory, and threw in an extra dozen as an extra accommodation. I was more than happy with the Patience rose, and loved having an extra dozen to work with!
A good friend of mine let me use her house to store the roses (she is very good with flowers and helps lots of tried a and family with their weddings), so we had them in buckets out of the sun and they all opened right up. They were stunning. We used seeded eucalyptus and both roses for all of the arrangements except the boutonnières, which we made with the ivory roses (the pink antique were just too big and too heavy for that). In total, we made two large arrangements in urns as floor displays on either side of where we made our vows, my bridal bouquet, a toss bouquet, and two small bouquets for mother of the bride and groom. And I had a few roses for my hair-- the pink one slipped a bit, due to its weight and a lot of wind that day, but the Patience rose was perfect. The two colors were stunning together, and with the seeded eucalyptus they all arranged like something out of an old Flemish painting. I recommend fiftyflowers without hesitation, and I heartily recommend these two roses. They're more expensive than non-garden roses, but they're stunning and they speak for themselves and they are worth it!
As for quantity, my bouquet had 25-30 roses, and was lush and big. I'm 5'8" and it was a great size bouquet for my height and a *very* full A-line dress. The toss bouquet was five or six roses and would be great for a junior bridesmaid (we didn't have any, but my little niece carried it around and it was perfect for a little girl). The mothers' bouquets were three roses each, and were perfect for almost a carried corsage kind of effect; they both loved them. And the urns had around 20-25 roses each (I think-- my friend made those while I was getting ready), plus seeded eucalyptus.
Six dozen would have been enough, but I had definitely had use for seven. More than that would have been too much for what we needed. It took about two hours to unwrap and condition everything, and another two hours when we put it all together. I'm very glad I kept the look to two types of roses and greenery, because it was easy to arrange and looked beautiful.
