Wedding Florist in Ardsley, NY · Backyard Weddings, Showers & the River-Town Venues Nearby

A tent looks like a blank canvas and is the most opinionated room you'll ever decorate. No walls, so the seating chart becomes a freestanding frame or an escort card table. Center poles in the middle of the dance floor, so they get wrapped in greenery and turned into columns. A floor that used to be grass, so tall centerpieces get heavier bases. Heat in July, so the flower list goes sturdier and everything stays in the truck until the last minute. We walk the property first, put the ceremony under the biggest tree with two grounded pieces, cocktail hour on the patio, and the tent for dinner, with bistro lights and candles carrying the night.

More of Ardsley's calendar is the celebrations before the wedding: a shower brunch for thirty, an engagement party for fifty on a Saturday evening in June. Small means closer, not simpler. One long table with a runner under ten inches, a mantel or a hedge dressed as the backdrop instead of an arch, bud vases guests carry home. We build in place an hour before and we're gone before dessert.

When the guest list outgrows the yard, Ardsley couples go to the water: the estates and clubs in Irvington and Tarrytown, the restaurants and halls in Dobbs Ferry and Hastings. Those rooms face west over the Hudson, which means twenty minutes of gold light and then dark, an arch that has to be opened up or turned so the couple isn't a silhouette, and a palette borrowed from the river. We design the ceremony for the view and the reception for candlelight, and we know which hour each room turns.