The Wedding Bouquet

My daughter's wedding anniversary has just passed and that always brings back memories of that hectic, joyous time.  It was another August, much like this one, when everything was lush and green.  We had spent hours grooming the yard (in fact the whole farm) for the upcoming festivities.  For once everyone pitched in to help with the yard work.  Sometimes it looked more like a party than work but everything seemed to get done.

My daughter was home to make plans and decisions for the upcoming wedding and had pitched in to help with some pruning and weeding.  As we worked around the yard she mused on the trouble she was having deciding what to use in her wedding bouquet.  She had spent the afternoon at the florist looking at books of designs but none of them suited her.  "They are either too formal and stiff or they are so stylishly simple they are silly.  The ornate ones are too fussy for me and the simple, single flower ones are too minimalistic.  I just want something that is simple, but homey too."  She gathered up a pile of weeds from under the hydrangea bush in the side yard.  She sniffed the big white bloom head and sighed, "When I think of home it's the things like this big old bush that come to mind." 

She looked around the yard.  "I love this yard.  It's so shady and full of stuff, yet it all looks like it belongs.  Like the yard and the house somehow grew here together.  It's pretty,  but it also is comfortable, like a warm hug."  I smiled to myself.  The yard blooming with roses, lilies, and hydrangeas in the summer and Iris, roses and day lilies in the spring was a feat of low maintenance beds and hardy perennials interspersed this summer, especially, with lots of bright annuals.  She had put her finger on the exact effect I had worked for--that it looked like it belonged to the farmhouse it framed. 

She gathered up the clippings and carried them to the edge of the hayfield that surrounds the front of the yard.  "Look!"  she laughed, "even the field is pretty!"  She pointed to the gently nodding, delicate blooms of the Queen Ann's Lace dotting the hay field.  Suddenly she turned and spread her arms wide.  "That's the answer.  I want this farm in my bouquet.  I want it filled with the flowers of my childhood and my home.  Roses, Queen Ann's Lace, and hydrangea blooms--that's what I want!"

Fortunately, the florist was a country girl and willing to try anything.  She planned and designed and added a few lilies and a little lily of the valley ("Oh, that's what grew around Grandma's steps." daughter remembered).  The day before the wedding the florist was literally picking flowers from the yard and road-side (Hubby had mowed the front field to manicure the farm for company so she had to broaden her area.) searching out the perfect blooms to make the "memory bouquet".

The day of the wedding the flowers were unveiled.  With a tear in her eye, the bride touched each flower...this is for my home, this one for the farm, and this one for family.  "It's perfect," she breathed.  And it was.

Unfortunately, it also weighed as much as a five gallon bucket of feed.

Thank goodness her farm girl muscles were up to the challenge of carrying it around.