Everything's Coming Up Roses

When Kim Meacham’s daughter, Paige, got engaged, the matter of flowers was a non-issue.

Kim owns The Paper Daisy Flower Boutique in the Short North, so it was only natural for her to serve as the florist for her oldest daughter’s wedding.

“That was the easiest part,” says Paige Murphy, who married Matthew Murphy at Jorgensen Farms on Sept. 28, 2018. “I remember right when I got engaged, I was like, ‘All right, so what are the flowers going to look like?’ ”

“She told me that she fully trusted whatever I wanted to do,” Kim adds. “She was a pretty easy bride.” In a similar vein, Paige trusted her mother with an additional task: booking the venue. In fact, Kim booked Jorgensen Farms for her daughter before she or Matthew had even toured the space.

“I had seen it an article before,” Paige says, adding that her mom vouched for the venue’s aesthetic as well, having seen it as a vendor. “So I said, ‘Sounds great. Let’s just book it.’ I left it up to my mom because she’s done so many weddings, and she knew what she liked. … I love her taste. We have very similar tastes.”

While that kind of blind trust for such a major wedding-day element might stress some brides out, Paige and Matthew are no strangers to taking leaps of faith. The high school sweethearts both had study abroad experiences during college, and together they made the spontaneous decision to move to Seattle, Washington, after college—without first lining up jobs. (That, too, has since worked out; Paige is a fashion designer at Nordstrom, and Matthew works an environmental consulting firm.)

“I just trusted her completely,” Paige says. “It was almost a relief … I felt like the best thing in my situation, because my mom knows so much, was to just let go. This is her element; this is what she does.”

Matthew, too, was “always on board” with Kim taking over the floral design, Paige says. “Matthew really cared about the whole wedding; he wanted to be a part of it, which was great because Matthew has a really amazing eye too,” she adds. “My mom and I would be talking about the flowers and he’d be like, ‘Oh wait, let’s throw some more pink in there.’ And I would say, ‘Oh yeah! Let’s throw some pink in there!’ So it was really fun to collaborate.”

For Kim, the hardest part of creating her daughter’s floral elements wasn’t in the design itself—it was in making sure she was present on the day of the wedding. “The flowers were so important to me,” Kim says, “But I knew that I needed to be 100 percent there for her, so I made sure I had a really good team.” Her staff, plus an additional florist friend and a day-of wedding planner, all were on hand to allow Kim to sit back and watch her vision unfold.

“They’re amazing,” Paige says of that team. “The things they do—I’m blown away.”

“It was totally perfect,” Kim adds. “I wish all weddings were as easy as my daughter’s.”