Princess Eugenie's Wedding Flowers are a Fall Floral Fantasy
St. George's Chapel in Windsor was adorned with autumnal flowers this morning ahead of the wedding of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank.
Floral designer Rob Van Helden went to town with displays around the entrance and either side of the steps below the entrance to the chapel, using foliage and flowering branches sourced locally from Windsor Great Park, as well as liquid amber trees, roses, hydrangea, dahlias, and berries.
The palette of russet, orange, blush, and oxblood sets a very different scene from the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May, and offers the first glimpse of Eugenie and Jack's vision for the day.
Dutch-born London-based Rob Van Helden is no stranger to high-profile events. He has long been a celebrity favorite, with past clients including Elton John, Pierce Brosnan and Autumn Phillips, the wife of the Queen’s eldest grandson, Peter Phillips.
He said in a statement about the wedding design process, that Eugenie had "been very involved from the start and has been instrumental in the autumnal theme."
Van Helden has a preference for natural-looking arrangements, so we can expect a bouquet that is hand-tied rather than stems that are wired and taped together. “I like designs to look natural and not contrived,” he says. “I love to work with a mass of one type of flower, as this is the way in which flowers tend to grow in the wild, and I particularly like to try to incorporate fruit, vegetables and herbs in to my work.”
The seasonality of Eugenie’s wedding flowers are dramatically different from the mostly white palettes chosen by the Duchess of Cambridge and Duchess of Sussex, whose weddings both took place in the spring.
Given that this is a royal wedding, Eugenie's bridal bouquet will be laden with significance. The use of myrtle is a tradition for royal brides dating back to Queen Victoria. Both Kate and Meghan’s bouquets included sprigs from a plant grown from the myrtle used in the Queen’s wedding bouquet in 1947, as did Eugenie’s mother.
Both Kate and Meghan carried a mixture of symbolic stems. At her wedding to Prince Harry in May, Meghan carried a small arrangement by florist Philippa Craddock containing scented sweet peas, lily of the valley, forget-me-nots, astilbe, jasmine, astrantia, myrtle, and several flowers hand-picked by Harry from the couple's private garden at Kensington Palace.
In turn, Kate, who married Prince William in April 2011, carried a bouquet by florist Shane Connolly that was almost entirely lily of the valley, as well as myrtle, sweet William, hyacinth and ivy.
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