Rancho Valencia, Rancho Santa Fe, CA
Luxury wedding floral design at Rancho Valencia Resort in Rancho Santa Fe. CHIC Flowers created romantic, garden-inspired arrangements with soft pastels and lush greenery for this Forbes five-star resort surrounded by olive groves and citrus trees.
The Wedding Story
Rancho Valencia Resort in Rancho Santa Fe is a Forbes five-star resort surrounded by olive groves and citrus trees — a quintessential Southern California luxury wedding destination. The resort's hacienda-style architecture and lush gardens inspired romantic, garden-style florals.
CHIC Flowers designed arrangements in soft pastels — blush garden roses, peach ranunculus, and ivory peonies — paired with lush greenery and herbs that echoed the resort's Mediterranean landscape. The ceremony in the citrus grove featured a romantic arch of cascading florals.
Reception tables on the lantern-lit terrace featured low, abundant arrangements that invited conversation, with trailing greenery connecting the table settings in an organic, flowing design.
Why this venue is unique
Rancho Valencia is the only Forbes Five-Star, Five-Diamond resort in San Diego County, set on 45 acres of olive and citrus groves in the hills of Rancho Santa Fe. Unlike most resort venues, the ceremony site is an actual working citrus grove — the trees are fruiting Valencia orange trees, not decorative landscaping. That setting carries its own scent (orange blossom) and its own color vocabulary (deep glossy foliage, pale green fruit) that any floral design has to integrate with, not compete against.
Floral challenges we solved
Designing for a living grove means working around trees we can't touch. The ceremony arch had to be freestanding with a narrow footprint to fit between mature trees without damaging root systems. We also had to time the install around the resort's morning fruit harvest schedule. The afternoon light in the grove is dramatic but shifts quickly as the sun moves behind the hills — we chose the palette specifically for how it reads in that late-afternoon filtered light, testing bloom samples on-site during a 4pm scouting visit two weeks before.
Our design approach
Rather than import a palette, we pulled color directly from what was already in the grove: ivory peonies echoing the orange blossoms, peach ranunculus picking up the fruit, blush roses for softness, and olive branches we cut on-site from the resort's own groves (with permission) to connect every arrangement to its immediate surroundings. The lantern-lit terrace reception kept the same botanical vocabulary but pulled in Mediterranean herbs — rosemary, lavender, thyme — so the scent profile carried from ceremony to dinner as the light transitioned.
Floral Highlights
- ✿Citrus grove ceremony with romantic cascading floral arch
- ✿Soft pastel palette with blush roses, peach ranunculus, and ivory peonies
- ✿Lantern-lit terrace reception with low abundant centerpieces
- ✿Trailing greenery connecting organic, flowing table designs
- ✿Mediterranean-inspired herbs and foliage accents
For this celebration we designed bridal bouquets, ceremony arch florals, reception centerpieces, and other wedding floral services.
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