Decorating a wedding barn with flowers!
I've been busier than the cabbage white butterfly that keeps laying eggs all over my nasturtiums since June. When people say they've been busy, they've generally got a couple of things on. Not me. I started a new business in March, then I started to kick my beer writing career up another gear, and then in case that wasn't enough, I booked out every single weekend for THREE MONTHS to catch up with friends and family members I'd not seen in ages (some of them years) and also, I've been travelling a lot for work.
Oh right, yeah, and I'm planning a budget wedding at a venue that doesn't usually host weddings.
I'm pretty busy.
That hasn't stopped me from being on the constant lookout for good local producers to use for my wedding. Although it's much harder to do these things yourself when you've got a lot of little stipulations and specifics, the advice I've been getting from every married person I know is "make sure everything you spend your hard-earned money on is something that you really want."
Flowers are something I really want. Flowers have been the only thing that ever excited me about wedding before. I love them. My sister had masses of rainbow coloured blooms all over her wedding and it was such a beautiful way to decorate her barn. She had a barn wedding too. The difference is, her barn was a beautifully restored stone-built barn with wooden eaves like a farmyard cathedral. Mine is a sheep shed, made of corrugated iron and concrete. It needs a bit of miracle work to make it look beautiful.
I chose our venue because it's a special location to us right in the middle of the Lake District. It's a working farm, and throughout the day, there'll be sheep and chickens wandering through, pigs grumbling in a nearby yard and cows mooing their congratulations from the fields and sheds nearby. I don't want to decorate the barn until it looks like we're somewhere else. I want to feel like we're on the farm.
So, instead of hiring a marquee company to hang fabric from the walls and enshrine us in voile tenting, I've covering the barn in flowers. I love the contrast of the industrial building and the delicate, natural floral arrangements I've chosen. I want our guests to notice and appreciate the utility of the place, and understand that we've chosen it because it's real and that it means something to us. And I want them to be surprised that a space like that can be beautiful. Only a week before the wedding, it will be a birthing suite for 50 or more Herdwick lambs. It's a special place.
The flowers. It's a huge deal to me that the flowers we use are real, seasonal and as local as possible. We're having a wedding in line with Beltane - the pagan festival of May Day - which celebrates new life, new beginnings and the hope and joy of spring. Plants are a huge part of this celebration, and so flowers will play an integral role to the wedding, in my mind anyway. For them to be seasonal is non-negotiable, given that this wedding is so reliant on the celebration of spring.
Lucky for me, I found Henthorn Farm Flowers. Kirsten Mackay is a freelance florist who creates beautiful, natural floral bouquets and displays using locally grown flowers without pesticides. So local, in fact, that she took me to see her flower fields. They were in her back garden.
Oh right, yeah, and I'm planning a budget wedding at a venue that doesn't usually host weddings.
I'm pretty busy.
That hasn't stopped me from being on the constant lookout for good local producers to use for my wedding. Although it's much harder to do these things yourself when you've got a lot of little stipulations and specifics, the advice I've been getting from every married person I know is "make sure everything you spend your hard-earned money on is something that you really want."
Flowers are something I really want. Flowers have been the only thing that ever excited me about wedding before. I love them. My sister had masses of rainbow coloured blooms all over her wedding and it was such a beautiful way to decorate her barn. She had a barn wedding too. The difference is, her barn was a beautifully restored stone-built barn with wooden eaves like a farmyard cathedral. Mine is a sheep shed, made of corrugated iron and concrete. It needs a bit of miracle work to make it look beautiful.
I chose our venue because it's a special location to us right in the middle of the Lake District. It's a working farm, and throughout the day, there'll be sheep and chickens wandering through, pigs grumbling in a nearby yard and cows mooing their congratulations from the fields and sheds nearby. I don't want to decorate the barn until it looks like we're somewhere else. I want to feel like we're on the farm.
So, instead of hiring a marquee company to hang fabric from the walls and enshrine us in voile tenting, I've covering the barn in flowers. I love the contrast of the industrial building and the delicate, natural floral arrangements I've chosen. I want our guests to notice and appreciate the utility of the place, and understand that we've chosen it because it's real and that it means something to us. And I want them to be surprised that a space like that can be beautiful. Only a week before the wedding, it will be a birthing suite for 50 or more Herdwick lambs. It's a special place.
The flowers. It's a huge deal to me that the flowers we use are real, seasonal and as local as possible. We're having a wedding in line with Beltane - the pagan festival of May Day - which celebrates new life, new beginnings and the hope and joy of spring. Plants are a huge part of this celebration, and so flowers will play an integral role to the wedding, in my mind anyway. For them to be seasonal is non-negotiable, given that this wedding is so reliant on the celebration of spring.
Lucky for me, I found Henthorn Farm Flowers. Kirsten Mackay is a freelance florist who creates beautiful, natural floral bouquets and displays using locally grown flowers without pesticides. So local, in fact, that she took me to see her flower fields. They were in her back garden.
Henthorn Farm Flowers is part of "Flowers from the Farm", a group of freelance florists in England who work together to help each other provide locally grown flowers and plants to people who want more eco-friendly blooms. What I love about Kirsten's work is that she works with the plants to show off their quirks, playing with shapes and colour to create natural looking bouquets and displays that look perfectly poised - like the perfect messy bun, they're effortless and stylish but have a little bit of messy cool about them too.
 |
| Henthorn Farm Flowers Insta - well worth a look |
The ideas I have for decorating the barn are grand and wild, but Kirsten knows what I need to do and she's had some brilliant ideas about how I can achieve the looks I want by myself in the run-up to the wedding.
If you're interested in getting some ideas and inspiration for decorating your own wedding barn with flowers and foliage, take a look at the Pinterest board Kirsten and I have been adding stuff to to share with each other. I've been hoarding stuff for months.
Comments
Post a Comment