Michaela and Ali's gorgeous wedding at Cooling Castle Barn

Any wedding featuring orchids and roses is bound to be gorgeous and Michaela and Alistair's was definitely no exception!  Using a palette of ivory and pale pink, with a fab couple, gorgeous bridal party, beautiful venue and lots of lovely finishing touches, this was always going to be a fave of ours.  We love working at Cooling Castle Barn for every wedding and particularly liked the way the downlighters picked up the detail of the flowers and the flowers in the stem of the vases.

For the ultimate glamorous bouquet, Michaela chose an elegant teardrop cascade of white phalaenopsis orchids with silver grasses and diamantes along with a butterfly brooch to finish.

For her attendants, Michaela chose pale pink, champagne and ivory rose bouquets with silver bear grass and spriggy diamantes, with her chief bridesmaid carrying one that was larger than the others.  We wrapped them all in ivory ribbon with a pale pink crossover to match their dresses.

Ali wore a beautiful phalaenopsis orchid buttonhole to match Michaela's bouquet whilst the rest of the boys wore pale pink rose buttonholes with silver grasses to match the bridesmaids.

For the ceremony, Michaela and Ali decided to keep their guests guessing about the colour scheme and chose a very elegant all ivory floral theme for the Fathom Barn.  We added a long and low arrangement to the celebrant table full of roses, lilies, orchids and other seasonal blooms.  We then dressed the dais with ivory organza and added a rose to each of the corner or end balustrades.  We then used our lovely silver tulip vases to frame Michaela and Ali taking their vows.  We filled them with a large hand-tied bouquet to match the celebrant table flowers and wrapped them lightly so they could double as thank-you gifts.  We also added a rose and bow to the bottom of the staircase to frame Michaela's arrival down the stairs.

For the wedding breakfast, we dressed the top table with a full length, slight messy foliage garland and added pink flowers to tie in with the rest of the colour scheme.  We then added a long and low and very full all ivory arrangement in front of the bride and groom.  We then finished each place setting with a personal orchid on the napkin

For the guest tables, we used a central mirror plate onto which we added a tall trumpet vase with orchids suspended down the stem.  We then added full top arrangements of lilies, roses, agapanthus, lisianthus and other seasonal flowers in pale pinks and ivory with silver bear grass, a few sparkles and then added some of the butterflies Michaela and Ali had provided as a finishing touch.

Our friends at Creative Cakes provided a lovely offset square three tiered cake dressed with orchids and grasses in sugarpaste.  Lovely.

We hope that Michaela and Ali had a wonderful honeymoon...we know they had to change their original plans due to unrest in Kenya, but hope that their wedding day and their honeymoon were truly magical.

Abbie and Ed's gorgeous Godmersham wedding

Earlier this month we provided the flowers for Abbie and Ed's wedding in the very pretty village of Godmersham.  They married in the church and then moved just up the road to a marquee on the lawns of the beautiful Godmersham House.  We met Abbie through a word of mouth recommendation, and once again were so lucky to be working with such a lovely couple.  Abbie wanted eveerything to be fairly natural and relaxed but pretty.  She also wanted to incorporate her favourite White Company candles on the tables.

The colour palette for the wedding was ivory, pale pink, lilac and grey / blue and we were blessed with fabulous peonies, O'Hara roses, La Belle roses, sweet peas, astilbe, waxflower, bouvardia, lisianthus, gypsophilia, freesias, veronica, rosemary, flowering mint and other gorgeous bluey grey foliages.  We were like children in a sweet shop surrounded by such prettiness!



Abbie's bouquet was a soft and textured hand-tied bouquet which smelt unbelievable!   Her bridesmaids also had textured hand-tied bouquets but we omitted the peonies and swopped O'Hara for La Belle roses.  The two Flower Girls were lucky enough to have gypsophilia crowns which I'm sure looked gorgeous on them, but are very difficult to photograph without a sweet Flower Girl!  Hence my challenge is to find creative ways to photograph them!

The boys had lovely textured buttonholes to tie in with the bouquets, with Ed's being particularly lovely with the O'Hara rose.

At the lovely spacious marquee, we dressed each table with a central pitcher filled with flowers and added lace wrapped jars and other pots around the outside along with Abbie and Ed's scented candles, fluted votives and tealights.  We were just supposed to be adding single flowers to the vases, but I'm sure they won't have minded us going a little further and adding more! We then finished the whole look by adding sprigs of gypsophilia to all the napkin ties.

We filled the length of the top table with a selection of vases, jars and pots filled with flowers, all wrapped in some way in lace.  We also added votives and scented candles to tie in with the rest of the tables.  It really did look and smell amazing!

Additional finishing touches included dressing Abbie and Ed's lovingly painted stepladder with jars of flowers to complement the "LOVE" letters.  We also added random jars to the cocktail bar (and were amazed to see absolute replicas of our two cats being the inspiration for the cocktails!) and we also dressed the scrummy looking chocolate cake.

Abbie and Ed's wedding day was lovely in every way, and everyone we met from the caterers, waitresses, fabulous candy cart girls to the actual marquee providers were great to work with.  It was a fab day for us and we were only setting up, so I can only imagine how much fun Abbie and Ed will have had on their special day!