Weddingbee boards

I found out that there is a wholesale flower warehouse in Silver Springs, MD (on the North side of the DC area).  It is called Potomac Floral (http://www.flowerwholesale.com/).  I called them, and they said they sell to the public, but do offer discounts to liscenced florists.  I have not visited their wharehouse yet, but I am planning on doing so to get some inspiration, and talk to the staff about ordering.  They accept orders online and on the phone too, and I think they deliver.  

Do tell us what you find!!! And if they deliver how great would that be???

Awesome tip thanks so much!

OK, so now that the wedding is over, I will tell you how it went with the flowers from Potomac.  I ordered the flowers online 1 week before the wedding.  The place does deliver, but I opted to pick up since I work near the warehouse.  There are delivery fees, but I don't know what they are.  I called ahead to let them know I was coming to pick up so they would have my order ready.  The wedding was on Saturday night and I picked up the flowers Thursday afternoon.

I did look at the flowers to make sure that they got the order right.  I ordered leonidas roses, spray roses, and some fillers and greens.  When I got home, I started to unpack the flowers and put them in water.  The flowers all looked good, except the leonidas roses.  It is hard to see the roses when they are all wrapped up, but when I unwrapped them, the roses were not fresh, the stems were slimey at the bottom, and a few had mold on them.  I knew I could not use them, so I called the warehouse and told them.  At first, the guy tried to tell me that is how they are supposed to look and that once I peel away the damaged outer petals (which you do anyway) they will look good.  I said, No, they actually have mold on them, I am not exaggerating.  So, he promised to fix it and was really nice.  I had the option of returning them to the warehouse for an exchange (it is a 1/2 hour drive from my house), or they would just refund me the money if I didn't want to go back to the warehouse.  I needed the roses, so I took them back and got new ones.  This time, they unwrapped everything to show me that they were good flowers.

 So, in the end, I would order flowers from Potomac again, but I would make sure to unwrap them and check them out first.  At least they did make everything right in the end and everything worked out OK. 

If you want to see photos of the flowers I did, go to http://munelitphoto.blogspot.com/ and it is the Saturday, Nov. 8, 2008 entry for Jessica and Adam.

I made the bouquets, corsages, and bouts on Thursday night.  I put the bouts and corsages in gladware containers and kept them in the fridge, and the bouquets I left out in vases, and all the flowers kept well and looked nice the day of on Saturday.  I recommend using roses because they were very sturdy and easy to work with and lasted a long time.