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LONDON: A video of grandmothers as ‘flower girls’ at the wedding of a grandchild has gone viral on social media.

When Michaela Treloar was planning her wedding, she was keen for the grandmothers of both bride and groom to take a prominent role on the big day.

But she had no inkling that not only would the pair relish the occasion, but emerge from it as a social media sensation, garnering millions of views on Instagram and TikTok.

“We wanted to include our grandmothers into our wedding somehow,” Ms Treloar told ABC Radio Adelaide.

“We came up with the idea of having our nonnas as the flower girls.

“They took it on with pride, smashed it, and now they’ve gone viral.”

“It was really cute … each nonna was helping each other get to the end of the aisle, chatting all the way,” Ms Treloar said.

“They had a white basket with petals and they were tossing them along the way down the aisle.”

But the tyranny of distance, with one grandmother needing to travel about five hours from Mildura to McLaren Vale, threatened to scupper Ms Treloar’s ambition from the outset.

“My nonna, she’s 95 and for the whole time she knew we were getting married in Adelaide she found it hard to get her head around travelling,” Ms Treloar said.

“A week before the wedding she gave Thomas and I our wedding gift and sadly said she couldn’t come to the wedding just because it was too hard for her physically.”

On the night of the wedding rehearsal, Ms Treloar said her husband’s nonna was crying because she felt unsure about doing the role by herself.

But little did she know a surprise was waiting for her.

“That night we had a family dinner and I walked in to my whole family gathering around, it all went very quiet, then everyone moved around and nonna was sitting on the chair, my nonna, smiling, laughing,” Ms Treloar said.

“My aunty went to her house on Thursday night and by late Thursday night she was in the car and she was coming to the wedding.

“There was a lot of happy tears and it made it extra special.”

The eleventh-hour coaxing yielded dividends for the wedding, and turned both grandmothers into a social media sensation along the way.

The groom’s grandmother, Nonna Umberta, said she was initially shocked when asked to take on the special role.

“I said ‘What am I going to do?,” she said.

“I was so happy.

“I didn’t even know what this thing going viral was because I’m old as well.

“They said ‘Oh, you’re on TikTok’ and I said: ‘What the hell is TikTok?’

“I’m so proud, so proud.”

Photographer Josh Huggett said while previous videos he had shared of weddings online had gained “a bit of traction”, none had been as popular as the one he posted of the nonnas.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the song,” Mr Huggett said.

“When I was posting the video I quite literally just picked a random acoustic song … the Instagram algorithm knows exactly what its doing when it auto-generates songs for you to pick.

“It hits that heart string straight away … it’s the perfect concoction of people saying they want to do that with their grandma, teamed with people saying they wish they could do that with their grandma now that they’d passed.

“Everybody could relate to the video in one way.”