The Wedding Diary: A Garden Party Theme
As soon as we’d decided to hold our wedding reception at home we knew we wanted a garden party theme for the day. This started with our invitations & was carried through the day from our choice of a marquee to all the vintage crockery I had been madly collecting.
Here’s a few tips for creating a real garden party themed wedding:
– Jam jars! I used jam jars as vases for the table flowers. My Mum & her friends were collecting them in the months before the wedding & it was such an easy way to bring a garden feel to the tables. By doing it ourselves we saved a fortune! Each jar was then tied with a raffia bow. With every table having different jars and flowers they all looked so pretty & individual.
– Country flowers. Getting married in September limited the choice of flowers I could use a little but I still tried to pick flowers with a country garden feel to them.
– Tea cups! I love vintage crockery & using it for our wedding was a perfect excuse to invest in just a few more beautiful vintage tea cups & tea plates. Everybody got one in their place setting which (aside from being useful when it came for tea time!) really made the celebration feel like one big afternoon tea party.
– Vintage Cake Stands! Lots of them in old glass and china for our table of delectable & scrumptious delights. We wanted to create the look of an old fashioned tea table stacked with pastel coloured Macaroons, Chocolate Profiter rolls, Ginger snaps, cup cakes & mini Creme Brulle.
– Luggage tags. Instead of place cards I used manilla luggage tags with names calligraphied in white – these were tied around the napkins & finished with a stalk of lavender. This had the added affect of making the marquee smell absolutely beautiful too.
– Vintage table cloths. I just adore old, hand embroidered table linen and so I just had to use some for the Top Table, the Wedding Cake table & the Memory Tree. These with the vintage china were such a simple and subtle way of adding a little colour.
– Sweetie jars. We wanted to make sure the children had lots of fun too – so we had jars filled with old fashioned sweets, Love Hearts, Parma Violets, Sherbet lollies, Cola Bottles & mini sticks of striped candy. Each jar had a little luggage tag to label them. I must say though I kept seeing ‘adults’ taking a sneaky handful & tucking in too!
– Mini old fashioned tent! Another idea we just had to have was a little old fishing tent for the kids. We filled it with pic-nic blankets and added little chairs and it was the perfect den to keep them entertained.
– Kids Table. Having been to so many weddings when my heart would go out to all the little ones who just didn’t want to be stuck in a high chair or on a table full of adults and to all the adults who just wanted to get on and enjoy the day I came up with the idea of a ‘Mini Table’. So with an old school table and some little chairs we set up a complete table just for them. They also had their own lunch – a goody pic-nic bag!
All of the photographs in this post were taken by the very talented Gill Taylor. You can contact her via her website.