The Farm-to-Centerpiece Movement

Not long ago, Jessica Gigot might have had a hard time designing a seasonal bouquet for her February wedding, even in the coastal Pacific Northwest with a relatively mild climate and long growing season.

But the explosion of interest in seasonal and pesticide-free food tilled in local soil is now spilling over into the commercial flower industry, making it possible to go local, even in the middle of winter.

Where small flower farms once seemed to be a vanishing species, new ones have been popping up across the nation. Farmers and growers are encouraging brides to eschew flowers that are out of season and have to be flown in from overseas, in favor of those grown nearby.

A seasonal bouquet is also more in line with a less formal, sylvan aesthetic, floral designers say, which means fewer blooms and in winter using more vines and evergreens, ornamental kale, moss-covered branches and snow berries.

“A fluffy dahlia is not what’s happening outside,” said Kelly Sullivan, a Seattle floral designer and grower who is designing the arrangements for Ms. Gigot. “In the winter, there’s this spare elegance,” said Ms. Sullivan, who for her design business, Botanique Flowers, draws from the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market Cooperative as well as from her own 6,000-square-foot backyard cutting garden. 

The bouquet she plans for Ms. Gigot will include maidenhair fern and frost-resistant hellebore blooms, greenhouse-grown rose blooms from Portland’s Peterkort Roses, and foraged items, like weathered seed pods and shelf mushrooms.