Which Season Should You Get Married In? A Floral Perspective

Aug 27

6 min read

A seasonal floral guide to the Pacific Northwest

"The Abundance of Winter" Centerpiece designed at Heronswood Garden in late winter

One of my favorite things about flowers is that they refuse to be exactly the same twice.

The garden changes from week to week. The weather changes what blooms early or late. A particularly warm spring can bring everything rushing in at once, while a cool summer can make us wait a little longer for the flowers we've been dreaming about.

And that's part of the magic.

When you choose a wedding date, you're not just choosing a Saturday on the calendar. You're choosing a landscape, a mood, a palette, and a particular moment in the life of the garden.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, every season has something completely different to offer.

So rather than asking, “When should I get married?”

I think the better question is:

“What kind of world do I want my wedding to feel like?”

Spring: tender, romantic, and full of anticipation

Spring in the Pacific Northwest feels like watching the landscape wake up.

The first bulbs push through the soil. Branches begin to flower. Everything is fresh and green and just a little bit precious because we know it won't stay that way for long.

This is the season for the flowers that make you feel like you've caught something at exactly the right moment.

Think tulips, ranunculus, anemones, narcissus, lilacs, sweet peas, foxglove, delphinium, bleeding heart, iris, and peonies as we move toward early summer. Exact timing varies, but spring farms across the region commonly see these kinds of blooms from March into June.

Spring has a softer visual language, but that doesn't mean your wedding needs to be soft or pastel.

You can create something wildly colorful and unexpected with spring flowers. You can embrace the almost ridiculous variety of tulips. You can play with chartreuse foliage, deep purples, muddy pinks, buttery yellows, and fresh greens.

And then there are the botanicals.

Flowering branches, young foliage, ferns, moss, vines, and other early-season textures can make a design feel like it is growing rather than being arranged.

Choose spring if you love:

Fresh greens. Tender color. Garden romance. Bulbs. Flowering branches. Delicate textures. A sense of anticipation.

Spring feels like the beginning of something.

And what better feeling for a wedding?

Summer: abundant, colorful, and completely alive

Summer is when the Pacific Northwest garden really starts showing off.

There is suddenly so much.

Flowers everywhere. Long stems. Tall grasses. Fragrant herbs. Vines. Seed heads beginning to form. More colors than you can possibly fit into a single palette.

Early summer brings flowers like peonies, foxglove, delphinium, sweet peas, alliums, astilbe, snapdragons, nigella, and roses, while the later summer garden shifts into an incredible abundance of dahlias, cosmos, zinnias, lilies, amaranth, celosia, scabiosa, lisianthus, yarrow, and so much more.

This is the season I think of when someone tells me they want their wedding to feel lush, exuberant, colorful, and completely immersed in flowers.

You can go big.

You can let the flowers spill out of their vessels. You can use enormous dahlias alongside tiny flowers and trailing vines. You can bring in herbs, vegetables, grasses, and unusual botanical elements. You can create installations that feel less like decoration and more like you've somehow brought an entire garden indoors.

And the color possibilities are enormous.

Summer doesn't ask you to choose between pink and peach.

You can have all of them.

Plus orange. And purple. And chartreuse. And burgundy. And whatever strange little color combination happens to make your heart race.

Choose summer if you love:

Abundance. Color. Dahlias. Wild garden energy. Long evenings. Big installations. Lots of movement. Flowers everywhere.

Summer feels like yes. More. Keep going.

Late summer & early fall: the garden at its absolute peak

If you love dahlias, this is your moment.

Late summer and early fall are when so many Pacific Northwest flower farms reach an incredible crescendo. Dahlias take center stage, joined by zinnias, cosmos, amaranth, celosia, lisianthus, grasses, rudbeckia, sunflowers, and an enormous range of textures and shapes.

This is also one of my favorite seasons for creating designs that feel abundant without feeling traditionally “bridal.”

There is something wonderfully unruly about a late-summer garden.

Flowers are everywhere, but they're not all behaving themselves.

Some are tall. Some are tiny. Some are trailing. Some are strange. Some are going to seed. Some have imperfect petals or beautifully crooked stems.

And that is exactly what makes them interesting.

This is the season for the couple who says:

“We want it to feel like a garden took over the wedding.”

Give me the dahlias.

Give me the amaranth.

Give me the vines and seed pods and weird little things growing in the field that I can't stop thinking about.

Choose late summer/early fall if you love:

Abundance. Saturated color. Dahlias. Texture. Strange botanical details. Movement. Golden light. A garden at its fullest.

This is the season that says:

Look how much life is here.

Fall: earthy, textural, moody, and a little wild

Fall flowers don't need to shout to make an impression.

This is when I start getting really excited about everything beyond the flower itself.

Bronzing foliage. Grasses. Seed pods. Amaranth. Celosia. Rudbeckia. Dahlias. Berries. Dried flowers. Branches. The garden starts to change character, and suddenly texture becomes just as important as color.

Fall can be incredibly colorful, but it doesn't have to mean pumpkins and burnt orange.

You can create a palette of dusty lavender, faded peach, olive, rust, burgundy, mushroom, plum, and butter yellow.

Or go deep and moody.

Or let the colors feel like they're slowly fading into one another.

There is something incredibly beautiful about using flowers at this point in their life cycle—when they're not necessarily at their freshest, most perfect moment, but when they're beginning to change.

Because flowers don't stop being beautiful when they begin to fade.

Sometimes that's when they're most interesting.

Choose fall if you love:

Rich texture. Earthy color. Seed pods. Foliage. Grasses. Moody palettes. Golden light. A little bit of wildness.

Fall feels like a celebration that knows how to linger.

And then there's winter.

Winter gets a bad reputation in the wedding world.

People imagine that if the flowers aren't growing in abundance, there won't be much to work with.

But I think winter asks a more interesting question:

What if we stopped trying to make winter look like summer?

Instead of pretending the garden is overflowing with flowers, we can celebrate everything that is beautiful right now.

Evergreen foliage. Moss. Branches. Lichen. Conifers. Interesting twigs. Berries. Dried flowers. Seed heads. Textural foliage. Bulbs beginning their quiet work beneath the soil. And my favorite, our farm's special collection of winter Hellebores, the most luxurious winter flower.

The Pacific Northwest has an incredible botanical vocabulary in winter if you're willing to look beyond the traditional cut flower. Native and adapted evergreen plants such as salal, evergreen huckleberry, sword fern, and other woodland textures can provide structure and atmosphere through the colder months.

Winter designs can feel incredibly atmospheric.

Think candlelight, mossy greens, sculptural branches, deep reds, creamy whites, dried elements, unusual textures, and flowers used intentionally rather than in overwhelming abundance.

It can feel like stepping into a woodland dinner party.

Or an old-world conservatory.

Or a winter garden after dark.

Choose winter if you love:

Mood. Texture. Candlelight. Evergreen. Moss. Branches. Woodland elements. Intimacy.

Winter says:

Look closer.

So... which season is right for you?

I don't think there's a universally “best” season to get married.

There is only the season that feels most like your story.

Maybe you love the anticipation of spring.

Maybe you want the absolute abundance of August.