Ravenna Florist & Greenhouses

Ravenna Florist has no Yelp reviews. How lucky am I?I am not the kind of woman who ordinarily gets excited about flowers. At all. I like practical things like good solid rock faces and mathematics and food whose origin I can point to. Flowers are about as important to me as make-up; which is to say, not at all. And yet, inexplicably, when I picture the arrangements Ravenna Florist surrounded us with at my wedding, I can't help but get choked up. What Ravenna did to our wedding was straight-up breath-taking and bordered on magical. And I was *not* the only one who thought so. Total strangers who worked for the park brought their friends through the reception hall (before the wedding revelers arrived) and were overheard *gasping* at the beauty of our hall filled with Ravenna's flowers, candles, center-pieces and table runners. (One employee said, "See? I told you!") These people see that same hall every day, decorated for a different event. I'm telling you, this lady is talented. I will try to post some photos here, by way of an example, but I'm not sure that will support my main point. Ravenna's arrangements for my husband and I were NOTHING LIKE the arrangements she had done for other weddings! What Francie seems to be good at is figuring out what her customers will love! And in our case, with very little to go on. I could never have said, "Oh I want exactly this!" I don't even know the names of more than two flower types. We said, "Oh, fall colors or something; natural textures," thinking, I think, that this would not be a very important aspect of our wedding, practical people that we were. I mean, fools that we were. Francie didn't talk much. She listened while we talked, and her hands were moving under the table the whole time. After a bit of prodding us and listening to us blabber in uneducated ways about flowers, she raised her hands with a sample arrangement. It was beautiful, and unlike anything in her samples book. I should have known right then that we were on to something.I liked her so well when that I confessed to her a fantasy that I'd had about our wedding. I kind of wanted an arch. We got married out-of-doors (at Natural Bridge) and there was nothing there to mark the location as that of a wedding. The risk of tacky white-ness was high; but she seemed to have grokked our preferences, and she assured me that it would not be expensive. When I saw the arch she built us before the wedding (with Francie on a ladder adding the last flowers to it), I cried. Me, mathematician and rock climber, wearing more makeup than I had the entire previous year combined, I covered my mouth and wept like a baby. It was beyond beautiful. She turned a blank spot on a boardwalk into a real place, for a real wedding. When I think back, her presence at our wedding seems as essential as ours. She made as large an impression as our celebrant, and much more than our DJ, and all without physically being there. If I could make her the richest florist on Earth, I would. If you get married in Red River Gorge (or thereabouts), you don't have a lot of options for a Florist. Most of them don't even answer your messages. Ravenna will answer the phone, of course. So even though your choice is pretty obvious from the first moment, I thought I'd put this out there, by way of a karmic thank you.