Back to earth post wedding

Gorgeous day here yesterday, good gardening...

But it has taken me all week to get back to some sort of normality post Joe and Daisy's wedding. For which I have no photos yet as my daughter and son in law took hundreds of photos for me and their camera was tragically on non-functionning mode. There will no doubt be lots of official ones at some point.

All went very well. Groom and bride very very happy. Ceremony delightful. Party amazing.  Lovely to stay at Butley Priory where the wedding was held.

It was a bit of a stretch doing all the flowers on my own so early in the year, and fitting everything into the Transporter van for the 6 hour transporting was more of a stretch, but all worked well. 20 tables each with three containers of flowers and two or three candle sticks/candelabra/hurricane vases, two large arrangements on stands, lots of small arrangements on mantelpieces and in recesses, three large hanging hoops with lights through them, two tall braziers.....  For the large arrangements I used mainly foliages, all sorts including lovely soft grey phlomis italica, escallonia, myrtles, loniceras, ivies, and some beautiful black catkin willows along with pussy willow and magnolia buds. Strung through with some little red tulips and tall white ones and some hellebores.  Table and occasional arrangements included small red and small white tulips (tunnel grown from the last garden, the remnants of those forced for my daughter's wedding last year), pulmonaria, bergenia, foliages, some random bits and pieces from the tunnel including a few heads of wild carrot, even some stocks, some little wild daffodils from the wild garden here and lots of white scented narcissi that I bought in from Cornwall as it absolutely poured for two days before the wedding and I couldn't pick as many wild daffodils here as I wanted, all was too soggy,. And lots and lots of hellebores.  Daisy's bouquet was hellebores with myrtle and a few white tulips, the little bridesmaid had narcissi and myrtle, the headdresses included rosemary, myrtle, a few anemones...... Buttonholes were hellebores and myrtle or tulips and myrtle. The hellebores had been picked on Wednesday, but were still perfectly happy on Saturday after their travelling - in fact many of them hadn't got into the ground here yet but were brought back from the `herefordshire garden in bloom the week before, I just cut the blooms. I loved the way they graciously bent and nodded rather than standing up straight.

I was pleased with the hanging decorations which looked effective in the space, I made large twisted hoops of willows and dogwood and included lots of good catkins and pussy willow sticking out from the main hoops, then strung them through with fairy lights.

None of the tables matched, I used a selection of different candle holders, some had a pair of hurricane vases, some had elegant candlesticks, some had scruffier candlesticks. And I placed a dozen tall wrought iron candlesticks around the ancient urn in the flowerbed in the centre of the marquee. I think it all looked good. I'm looking forward to photos.

And now it's to the gardens here in earnest. Trying not to panic. And looking forward to all those tulips from the Herefordshire garden soon.