How to Clean Roses for a Bridal Bouquet

Your wedding day is one of the most important days of your life, and you want everything to be perfect: the invitations, the food, the music…and the flowers. Floral arrangements help tell the story of your love, help make the day feel as special as it is. Roses, lilies and other flowers, with their vibrant colors and scents, represent a new, rich life together.

In the broadest sense, floral design is the art of combining plants, flowers, and cuttings into an aesthetically pleasing array. Flower arranging is thousands of years old; mankind has employed it in such notable works as the hanging gardens of Nineveh and Central Park in New York.

Wedding flowers and floral arrangements play an important part in helping us celebrate one of the major milestones of life. In this free video series, learn how to arrange bridal bouquets in several different styles, including the cascade, the pageant bouquet, the standard hand-tied bouquet and the nosegay. Get wedding bouquet tips and techniques for creating your own special bridal floral arrangement.

"Hi! My name is Amelia Tallman and I’m here today talking about creating bridal bouquets. Now, varieties of flowers are used in bridal bouquets. Most commonly however is the rose so it’s important to know how to treat your roses. When you get them from the florist or from the flower shop or if you’re buying them just in bulks a lot times they have a lot of thorns on them so you’ll want to remove those. You can remove a thorn by pressing your thumb the side of it and snapping it off or if you’re a little nervous about that you can just use a knife and slide it along the stem of the rose to peel it off. Another thing you want to do with your rose is take off the guarder petal. These are the outside petals and they’re usually not quite as pretty. A lot of times you’ll see a slight green vein up the outside and you just want to go ahead and remove those because they don’t really enhance the rose and a lot times they’ve been damaged in transport."