You have chosen the colours, worked with your florist, found the flowers you love and potentially spent hundreds – or even thousands – of pounds getting everything just right. Your wedding day then arrives, the flowers look incredible and, after all of that planning, you are left with a slightly strange question: what do you actually do with your wedding flowers afterwards?

It is one of the unusual things about wedding flowers. We put an enormous amount of thought, money and effort into choosing them, but within a few days of the wedding they will begin to wilt and, within a week or two, many will be gone completely. Of course, you will still have the photographs and memories, but if there are particular flowers that you would love to keep, you have more options than simply putting them in a vase and enjoying them for another few days.

Wedding flower preservation allows you to professionally preserve some or all of those flowers, potentially keeping part of your wedding bouquet for decades rather than days.

What can you do with wedding flowers after the wedding?

First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with simply enjoying them! Put your bridal bouquet in a vase, give your table flowers to guests or send arrangements home with parents, grandparents and members of the wedding party. After spending so much on beautiful fresh flowers, you might as well enjoy them for as long as possible.

However, if there are flowers that you would be genuinely sad to throw away, wedding flower preservation gives you another option. Instead of watching your bouquet slowly wilt, you can have the flowers professionally dried before turning them into something that you can keep.

This could mean preserving your whole bouquet within a deep-set frame, or using individual flowers and petals to create resin hearts, photo frames, paperweights, ring holders, jewellery, keyrings, bookmarks or even a table. At Ezra's Confetti, we have more than 1,000 different flower preservation options, so the question of what you can do with your wedding bouquet actually has quite a lot of answers!

Can you send a wedding bouquet through the post?

Yes, and this is probably one of the things that surprises people most about wedding flower preservation. Around 99% of the flowers we preserve are sent to us through the post, meaning that you don't need to live nearby or spend the morning after your wedding driving your bouquet across the country.

Understandably, couples can be slightly nervous about putting their wedding flowers into a box. They worry about whether the flowers will survive the journey, whether they will go off or whether they will arrive in a terrible state. In our experience, properly packaged flowers travel extremely well.

When you book your wedding flower preservation into our diary, we provide clear instructions explaining exactly how to package and send everything. In simple terms, this involves carefully packing the flowers using materials such as craft paper and kitchen roll, securing them within a suitable box and sending them using next-day delivery. This process works incredibly well.

What happens when we receive your wedding flowers?

Once your flowers arrive with us, the first major job is to professionally dry them. There are, of course, ways to dry flowers yourself at home, but we are working on a completely different scale, using specialist equipment and professional materials to thoroughly dry the flowers ready for preservation.

This isn't simply a case of hanging your bouquet upside down for a couple of weeks and hoping for the best. Different flowers behave differently, thicker petals can take longer to dry and the process will also vary depending on what you ultimately want us to create.

From receiving your flowers through to completing the finished items, we would typically advise allowing around four months, although this can sometimes be a little shorter or longer depending on the flowers and what you have ordered. Flower preservation isn't something that we want to rush; after all, these are your wedding flowers and we only get one set of them!

What can wedding flowers be turned into?

In short, anything that you could dream of! Larger resin flower preservation pieces can include hearts, orbs, photo frames, paperweights, ring holders, decorative letters, statement pieces and even tables, while smaller amounts of flowers can be used within jewellery, keyrings, bookmarks, coasters, hair clips, beads and all sorts of smaller gifts and keepsakes.

We even have animal designs, including different breeds of dog. Basically, if you can imagine something, ask us. If you have found an idea on Pinterest or elsewhere and would love to create something similar using your wedding flowers, send it over. As long as it is physically possible and there is an appropriate mould available somewhere that we can get our hands on, we will do our best to make it happen.

One of the nice things about this is that you don't necessarily have to use your entire bouquet for one large item. A wedding bouquet can go a surprisingly long way, so you might decide to have one larger piece for yourself alongside several smaller items for other members of the wedding party.

Does wedding flower preservation have to involve resin?

Not at all. While resin wedding flower preservation is one of our most popular options, it isn't the only way to preserve your bouquet.

We can professionally dry your flowers and arrange them within a deep-set frame, allowing you to display the flowers without encasing them in resin. Alternatively, we can professionally dry the flowers and simply return them to you. You may already know exactly what you want to do with them afterwards but don't have the specialist equipment or materials to dry them yourself, and that is absolutely fine too.

There isn't one correct way to preserve wedding flowers. It depends on what you would like to keep, how you would like to display it and whether you want something decorative, practical or perhaps small enough to give to other people as a gift.

Making your wedding flower preservation personal

Whatever you decide to create, we don't want to take your wedding flowers and simply churn out exactly the same thing that we made for somebody else the week before. Everything can be bespoke, and you can have as much or as little input into the finished design as you want.

You can talk to us about the particular flowers you would like featured, their arrangement, colours, lettering and other personalisation. Catherine creates our artwork and calligraphy, meaning that we can incorporate names, dates, initials and other personalised details, while Jamie, our resin artist, creates the finished resin pieces using the flowers that we have professionally preserved.

You can also include other small memories from the wedding alongside your flowers, depending on what you are creating. Ultimately, these are your wedding flowers and your memories, so the finished piece should feel like it.

How long do preserved wedding flowers last?

This is one of the main reasons that couples choose to preserve their wedding bouquets. Fresh flowers are beautiful, but their lifespan is inevitably short. Properly preserved flowers can instead be enjoyed for many years and potentially decades, although they are still natural materials and some change over time is completely normal.

How you look after the finished piece will also make a difference. We wouldn't recommend leaving resin flower preservation in intense direct sunlight or close to a significant heat source every day. If you put something on a very sunny windowsill for years, natural changes and fading are likely to happen more quickly. Keeping your preserved flowers away from constant direct sunlight and excessive heat will give them the best opportunity to continue looking beautiful for a very long time.

We aren't claiming that preservation somehow freezes a flower in time forever. The difference is that we are talking about potentially keeping part of your wedding bouquet for many years rather than watching it disappear within a week or two.

Don't forget about all the other wedding flowers

It also doesn't have to be your bridal bouquet. Think about all the other flowers that you might have around you on your wedding day: bridesmaid bouquets, buttonholes, table arrangements, ceremony flowers or perhaps one particular flower that was included because it had a special meaning to you.

All of these potentially give you more options when deciding what to preserve. You might want to keep your main bridal bouquet largely together while using flowers from elsewhere in the wedding to create gifts for parents, bridesmaids, grandparents or other people who played an important part in the day.

In fact, flower preservation can make a particularly personal thank-you gift because you aren't simply buying somebody something after the wedding; you are giving them an actual piece of the flowers that were there on the day.

So, what should you do with your wedding flowers after the wedding?

The answer is really whatever you want! Enjoy them fresh for as long as possible, fill your house with them and give some away to the people who shared the day with you. However, if there are flowers that you know you would be genuinely sad to throw away when they begin to wilt, it is worth thinking about wedding bouquet preservation before the wedding happens.

You don't necessarily need to know exactly what you want us to make straight away. The important thing initially is getting the flowers to us safely so that we can begin professionally drying them. From there, we can talk through the possibilities and work out what you would like to create.

It might be a frame, a resin heart, some jewellery, a photo frame, something for your parents or something completely unusual that you discovered while scrolling through Pinterest at midnight. There are an enormous number of possibilities.

After all the time, thought and money that goes into choosing your wedding flowers, it can seem a bit of a shame for them to last only a few days.

They don't have to.