I’ve been pondering what to tart up the trestle tables in the marquee with. I’d already decided on simple bowls of mixed dahlias (I’ll have enough to do on the big day without fluffing about endlessly arranging fiddly floral displays), but I didn’t want to use glass bowls. Originally I thought about using galvanised buckets, but they’re a tad too tall – and there’s nothing worse than sitting at a table with an arrangement in the middle that’s so big you can’t see over or around it. Today I found the ultimate vessel: white ceramic mixing bowls. I bought eight for $15 each on sale at Stevens. Plus they’ll come in handy on the day before the wedding, when I intend to knock out a couple of hundred cupcakes…

And here’s a nifty tip from Vida Flores. The easiest way to display large, heavy, short-stemmed flowers in shallow bowls like this is to grab a roll of Sellotape and run strips across the top of the bowl, from side to side, to make an invisible supporting grid. Then just drop the blooms through the grid until there are no gaps showing. It’s ingenious – it means you use fewer flowers and you don’t have to jam them all up tightly so they support each other.