A Barn Reception for My Parents' 50th Anniversary

We had a 50th Anniversary party for my parents in a barn at a beautiful vineyard and winery near my hometown. Since it was their "golden" anniversary, the theme was shabby chic with gold accents. At first, I was going to design my own centerpieces, but these "ready to go" centerpieces all of the flowers I was planning on buying and then some, and it was a lot more convenient and economical to buy them this way than if I had bought them "a la carte".

The first three photos show the 18 "centerpieces", or bundles, of flowers I bought after they had been rehydrating in my mother's garage for a few hours. I think the flowers were more smooshed from the box than dehydrated, because the water level didn't drop significantly. The delphinium looked pretty sad at first, but they really opened up after a day or two, and was quite stunning the day of the event.

We used blue wide mouth quart sized mason jars for the 10 tables we set. We had plenty of flowers left over for the cake table and the beverage table, and a few arrangements displayed on wine barrels at the door. I also made one larger arrangement by combining all of the flowers from two of the bundles and arranging then in a half gallon ultra wide mouth mason storage jar. That was my mother's favorite arrangement. It is shown in the last two pictures.

As far as customer service, I got a call from Fifty Flowers right after I placed the order to recommend that I have the flowers delivered earlier. The event was Saturday afternoon, and I requested delivery on Thursday morning. Since I wasn't arriving in town until Wednesday night, I left the delivery as originally scheduled. I used Floralife Quick Dip instant hydrating treatment, as well as flower food to get them to open in time. I don't know if that made any difference, but the day of the event, about 90% of the sunflowers had opened, and the delphinium had really filled out. I didn't have any further communication with Fifty Flowers until I got a text stating the flowers had been delivered. I did log onto my account the Monday before the flowers were due to be delivered and noticed that they had been assigned a tracking number, so I was able to track the package and I knew when to expect it. My only criticism is that it would have been nice if they had emailed the tracking number to me when the flowers shipped.

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