No petals, no problem!

St. John has a lot of rules & regulations about what can and cannot be done on the beach. I posted recently about no glass on the beach but another rule is that whatever we wedding planners bring in to decorate must be completely picked up after the wedding or we risk fines and possibly even losing our permit to do weddings on the beaches. This makes sense though, right? Leaving trash or decor behind would not be a nice thing to do...but this includes EVERYTHING, even rose petals that your flower girl may toss as she walks down the aisle. Every single rose petal must be picked back up before we leave. Because this can be nearly impossible, we don't really allow anything on the beaches in St. John that could possibly be left behind and get us in trouble. A recent bride really loved this look and wanted to duplicate it for her ceremony:

This is a bougainvillea aisle - this petals can be cut from their branches much like rose petals can be plucked from their stems. But just like rose petals, they are a pain to get all cleaned up. Thankfully, our florist was able to come up with a wonderful solution that really turned out cool:

These hot pink carnations were placed in floral oasis blocks - easy for us to set down and even easier to pick up and gave us a very similar look. The cool thing is that bougainvillea only comes in hot pink...but these could be done is just about any color to match your wedding colors!