Florists - worth the money or not

[shinybaubles]

I will get a florist to do bouquet, corsages and button holes. But the quotes I got for table arrangements has left me shocked, we will have approx 25 people on 3 tables - very small do. And the florist is recommend 5 per table, so 15 at 35 pounds - £525 - it seems like an awful lot to me - is this just the normal price? I do appreciate the value of having someone else do it with expertise, they are also charging £90 to set up at venue.
And advice

Me again..I'm not stalking you promise! I am a bit wedding obsessed, have my own blog and everything. Quite sad I am!

I think it depends what you are looking for. For me, I am not that in to flowers and so had a budget of £1000 (we had two venues to dress, the day one for 56 and had 9 tables and then an eve venue for 200 which had 20 tables) so did pretty well to come in just under.

We had a few different centrepieces but the cheapest one (which was about £15) was basically a large white flower head (a chrysanthemum I think) floating in some water in a gold fish bowl style vase.

It depends what type of wedding you are having but I'd rather do something like this and add some cracked antique looking votives with tea lights in and around for a really simple but effective (and cheap!) table. This way you have a lovely looking table and you can still use a florist to do it so you don't have the hassle on the day.

Let me know if you want some pics

That seems an awful lot of table flowers, wouldn't one centrepiece per table make sense?
You need to have room for plates and glasses and stuff!!

Hi jojosmaman - nice to see you again, I too would like lots of candles and mirrored things - tastefully done - hard to explain. I don't have time to find another florist the wedding is the 22 December, so I guess I either go with these florists or do the table arrangements myself. Choices , choices..

Isaidno - you are quite right about the lack of room on the tables - need to consider that also.

nooo! we just had helium balloons in the centre in our colour scheme (purple and cream) which we did ourselves, tethered to some pretty weights.