“Beautiful Weddings” by Carole Hamilton from Ryland Peters and Small can’t be beat. This is essential to planning a wedding. It guides you through every step of the process from choosing a theme and place to the date and flowers and all the other details.

Whatever sort of theme you have in mind, this guide will help you create a memorable event. It has literally hundreds of ideas based on 20 real-life weddings.

This title devotes a section to each style of wedding, including romantic, traditional, and contemporary.

The introduction features in-depth details on all the basics of planning. It tells how to go about planning step-by-step, such as how to choose a florist and plan your wedding flowers, how to determine a budget, how to choose the best date, and so on.

Throughout the introduction there are helpful boxes with quick tips and ideas. One of these features tried-and-true color themes. In addition, there are helpful suggestions for each type of wedding, such as suitable colors and fabrics for a romantically themed one.

For each of the featured weddings, there is an in-depth profile with a behind-the-scenes account of every aspect of how it was planned with details on wedding floral designs, etc.

This is lushly illustrated in color as well as black and whites with many full-page illustrations.

The floral designs used in all of these weddings are just sensational. Floral designers will find the examples in this book are so inspiring. There is every kind of arrangement than you can imagine in the examples from floral wrist corsages for the bride and her party to buckets of flowers attached to the ends of the pews for a traditional church wedding. Flowers are literally used everywhere from railings along the sides of buildings to the chair backs and doors.

All types of flowers for weddings are used in these examples. These range from tulips and calla lilies to orchids and gerberas. In addition to flowers and other decorations, other covered topics include food and drink, lighting, venue, table settings, and so on.

The appendix has a very helpful list of details on each of the featured weddings. This tells who did the flowers, who was the photographer, who was the wedding planner, and so on.