How To Plan A Garden Wedding

Ellie: Hi, I'm Ellie.
Charlotte: And I'm Charlotte, and we run a wedding boutique.
Ellie: Today, we're going to talk about how to plan your wedding.


Charlotte: If you're thinking about planning a garden wedding, first of all, you need to decide what kind of atmosphere and vibe you want to create. You're going to be needing a marquee of some sort because you need somewhere for your guests to eat, your caterers to set up, etc, and to protect them from certain whether elements. So I think the three main options of a garden are very, very contemporary so it can be very clean, the center pieces are quite compact and bijou.

You know all the cutlery's clean the foods contemporary.
Ellie: A lot of white.
Charlotte: Yes, very clean.

Or you can go more for the sort of English country garden, so you could have like a tea party, old china, or you could go for the 1920's fete kind of build which is actually what we organized last year for Ellie's wedding. So, we sort of embraced the whole 1920's fete. So, we had an old star marquee and again, I think that's quite important to decide what sort of style of marquee that you want.

So, we had a sort of 1920's old canvass marquee with the wooden poles and the pastille and the lining and –
Ellie: Yeah and so then, we put, we had trestle tables and we had just found some of this amazing tablecloth, white, clean tablecloth and that actually became the center piece for the different tables, so rather than having like a code for each table, we had a color so each table was a different color. And then, we made loads of bunting. So, we put this all the way around the marquee all the way in the garden so we had meters and meters of it.

So this really sort of created the whole atmosphere as soon as people walked into the reception, they were greeted with color and bunting and they could see the sort of marquee in the distance, and then you're going to think about center pieces obviously because it's sort of a fete style, you don't want the center pieces to be over the top. So, we just had little jam jars with hand picked flowers and again, we sort of did everything ourselves so you don't actually need to spend that much money when you're trying to create, you know, having a garden wedding because it is all about sort of being outside in the outdoors and sort of embracing that. Just little things like having mustard on the tables, so everything's very sort of quintessentially English, and then think about what sort of food options you want.


Charlotte: Yeah, we thought about food. We thought about the drinks you know, you need to also, I know champagne has lots of bubbles, you can have Pimm's and lemonade. You can have traditional lemonade for the children, so again, in reflecting the theme.

And for food, we wanted to embrace the fete style so we had a hog roast and it was absolutely delicious, so you had a buffet style food but everyone helped themselves, so you had to cue up.
Ellie: So, everything was a lot more relaxed and again, what you were saying about sort of catering for the children as well, we had coconut shy. So actually, that sort of period of the two hours where all of the photographs are being taken and sort of the champagne reception, the kids get really bored so actually having a little activity for them to do entertains them, keeps the adults happy, and sort of makes the whole thing feel more like a fete.


Charlotte: Yes, and that's how you plan a garden wedding.
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