Small Wedding Inspiration

April 02, 2021 by Caitlin Robinson

There’s no question that weddings have looked different over the past year! As more people get vaccinated and things open up again, many lovebirds will be able to look forward to a return to “normal” in terms of their wedding. We’re anxious for that time too, of course, but we also hope some of the changes are here to stay! Now more than ever, a thoughtfulness and a pruning has come into wedding planning. Behind all the “no’s” there is a bigger “yes” that we can embrace to make extravagantly beautiful, small weddings.

Never thought you’d have a small wedding? Don’t shy away from it. All the impractical dreams you’ve had about getting married under a wild apple tree or having your Mom’s famous cheesecake for dessert are all of a sudden totally doable. Here are a few ideas to inspire and reassure you that a small wedding can be a gorgeous and meaningful experience. In fact, you may find that the best extravagant version of your real life might be more memorable and meaningful than an epic day of unfamiliarity based on practical decisions for a larger event.

Elevate the ordinary. Everything is suddenly possible.

Honor your families...

Dust off your parent’s wedding china and set the table outside. Need more plates? Mix and match from both of your families and let the memorable stories begin…

Treat yourself…

Now is the time to get that beautiful farmhouse table or that set of linen napkins for your house. Instead of renting a zillion tables, you can own it forever and tell all your future children and dinner guests about your wedding feast. This is also a good opportunity to enhance the landscaping in your yard! Plant trees and perennials that you’ll enjoy for decades. Each time those peonies or that dogwood tree bloom, you’ll be reminded of your wedding day.

Give everyone a role they’ll delight in…

Your nieces and nephews can make name place cards for the table.
Your best friend can fulfill her dream of being a cocktail mixologist for an evening.
Let your partner’s buddies string all the lights in the trees, carry out the living room furniture and set up the fire pit.
Your dad always had the best taste in music, task him with the cocktail hour playlist!

Relax…

Get cozy and revel in all the ordinary moments you’ve spent falling for each other.

Go for a walk…any time of the day!

Don’t be afraid to spend some time alone on this momentous day. With less hustle and bustle and 100 less people to talk to, there’s probably time.

Serve your favorite foods and drinks...

Think of the best meal you’ve ever shared. What are your family specialties? Spend time crafting a menu. Cater from your favorite restaurant or have a collaborative farm to table meal with your parents at the grill. Suddenly it’s practical.

And of course… splurge on flowers!

We may be partial, but nothing transforms a space quite like flowers. Wow your guests and create the wedding atmosphere of your dreams with locally farmed and foraged flowers. Picture this: Each guest chooses a breathtaking bloom from a bucket before the ceremony. As you walk down the aisle, gather your bouquet from all the people who’ve made up your lives. You can of course have a separate Sungold bouquet for pictures if you choose. Consider ordering flower crowns for all the ladies, or have a table for hair flowers and buttonholes. Celebration and merriment never looked better. With fewer centerpieces, you can go big on decking out the dinner table…think old world, over the top feast.

Hire a top-notch photographer to document the day…

Later you can be your own journalist and write captions for your wider circle of friends and family who weren’t present. You can even share your own preparation photos for the enjoyment of all...

“Here they are trying to fit the couch out the door”

“Here’s grandma with her flower crown! Doesn’t she look smashing?”

Embrace the opportunity for an intimate wedding celebration - to see what we have to offer, head on over to our Wildcrafted Weddings page. A curated collection, transparent pricing, and easy online ordering.

We’ve booked some of our favorite weddings through word-of-mouth! Feel free to forward this to someone you know who’s planning a wedding.

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Makers Meals: Montgomery County AG Reserve at Shepherd's Hey Farm

March 06, 2019 by Caitlin Robinson

I’ve always felt more comfortable surrounded by the natural beauty of Creation, especially when paralleled with the hectic cyber world of our modern day. I prefer to immerse myself among the people and places that I love and I find that grounding myself in my habitat provides unlimited creative inspiration.

For this specific event, which brought together farmers, artisans, chefs, and lovers-of-all-things-local, the inspiration began when my boys brought back a crate of wild pears from our woods. They had discovered a tree while Dad was moving the sheep. "Don't eat them mom, we're saving them for winter!" (Sounds like someone has been reading a lot of Blueberries for Sal!) I saw them and immediately wanted to use them for arranging but they didn't quite fit the wedding for that weekend. Ah, the Makers Meal! These wild tan asian pears were so beautiful clumped up together in a bowl, an example of the season’s wild, nourishing abundance.

As a farmer, working hard to grow flowers and raise meat, it is refreshing and energizing to notice all the things the Maker has provided and raised up for us in our very own woods and meadows, without our toil, just for the taking. The pears for instance, were delicious and didn't require the intense care that we give our peach orchard or grapes. The deer that people hunt in the woods...meat, already raised up and fed and healthy and happy, without our lifting a finger. I don't ever want to get so head down preoccupied with farming that I miss the Maker's bounty. In fact, some of the weeds in our veggie garden are packed with more nutrition and natural vigor than the greens we plant to replace them. What a good perspective shaker! One of my farmer heroes, Mark Shepherd says "Why do we spend so much time killing the things that want to live and keeping alive the things that want to die?" Good inspiration to work with the Maker and take advantage of the local abundance right?

I immediately thought it would be fun to do the Makers Meal dinner with only botanical ingredients straight from the Maker. Caitlin quickly agreed. The wheels began turning. We would only use the ingredients that we did not have a hand in growing. Free for the taking, a gift just waiting to be enjoyed.

Not surprisingly, this is how I got into flowers in the first place. I would walk home from school picking Queen Anne's lace, finding that I had a power to create something out of practically "nothing." When you are able to create a meal when there's little in the fridge or a cool new outfit by layering your sisters’ and brothers’ clothes together you have some sort of super power. Maybe its an edgy kind of resilience that comes from growing up in a big family or just a good set of eyes to see how pieces fit together. Either way, its a habit that I rely upon often.

If you were to take a walk through the woods in late October, you’ll notice there's not much in the way of flowers. But when you’ve when you've acquired the right kind of eyes, “tuned in” to the ingredients in the natural world, you can make something you never thought possible. The wild persimmons, dogwood branches, and porcelain berries were aching to be used. During the process, we wondered a handful of times whether we were making the right call. This exercise of using 100% foraged material meant forgoing all the stunning, end-of-season dahlias in our gardens (which is the other reason I love flowers). However the scenario was too good to pass up. It was a welcome challenge in the midst of a full season of heavily floral wedding arranging.

With only a vague vision of what we were up, we arrived at the open barn with our buckets of foliage, vines, and branches, just as the chilly night set in. Caitlin and Lissie and I set about scanning the rafters and the plan for the hanging installation above the table began to come into focus. Remembering the pile of farm-related discards behind the barn, Caitlin suggested we look there for something to use as the frame-work for the install. It only took a few minutes for us to find an old cattle panel, normally used for containing livestock. This section of fencing was no doubt placed there because Farmer/Shepherdess Lee KNEW that it would be used again for something…although I can guarantee she didn’t think it would be revived as a floral chandelier. When we told her the following evening about our foraging in her trash pile, she couldn’t stop laughing. Caitlin with all her magic tricks pulled out some perfect heavy gauge steel wire, clips, hooks and doodads from her bag and we were able to suspend it above the end-to-end whitewashed farm tables.

We also foraged a gate for another cool rustic piece upfront which was already decorated with a mat of dead leaves and a tangle of grass which Lissie wisely told me to leave on for effect. The table scape, with all its different textures came together like a woodland dream. Sturdy, velvet-backed magnolia, fallen branches covered in lichen, petite, speckled persimmon, shimmering porcelain berries, and of course the wild pears that set the whole thing into motion.

Working with the seasons means seeing beauty in whatever is going on out there. The process and life cycle of the plants, just as interesting in their full green glory as they are in their autumn splendor. The decay, deadness and then again the budding. It is this sequence of intricate beauty that the Maker displays and we as Sungold hope to show you through our art.

Details/Credit:

Makers Meals

Holson House

Bread and Beauty Cookbook

Lady Farmer

Shepherd’s Hey Farm

Sungold Flower Co.

Plow and Stars Farm

From the Earth Foods

Watershed Cafe

Rocklands Farm Winery

Twin Valley Distillers

Soleado Lavender Farm

Banner Bee Company

Something Vintage Rentals

Cool and Earthy Fall Palette for Maggie + Dan's Rocklands Farm Wedding

November 10, 2018 by Caitlin Robinson

We first met with Maggie and Dan back in December of 2017, practically a year before their wedding date. After only a few minutes of chatting, we could tell that this celebration was going to be a good one. Both Maggie and Dan are incredibly detail oriented and design-minded, and perhaps most importantly, thoughtful. They wanted to ensure that each element genuinely reflected them and their story, which is a process that we are always so proud to be a part of.

In our meeting and through the e-mails and conversations that followed, we came up with a plan to include as much locally-grown flowers and foliage as possible, even though the wedding was set for mid-November (likely post-frost here in the DC area). The main color palette was dusty grey-blue, muted greens, brighter blues, turquoise, navy, and white with succulents, seed pods, and lots of texture. They wanted an earthy, wild, enchanting and organic vibe, authentic to time and place.

Each of the 15 centerpiece vessels were hand-thrown, stamped, glazed and fired by Dan, and we spent a sunny afternoon outside the workshop planting them with succulents and aloe sourced from Thanksgiving Farm just up the road. We took a few minutes to walk down to the creek and grab some Seneca sandstone rocks to add. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the final product.

Maggie’s bouquet was so fun to put together, using eucalyptus from M and M Plants in Comus, MD, foraged seed pods, grasses, porcelain berry, and privet as well as our own dusty miller, herbs, clematis, dried lavender, raspberry greens, and the very last of the dahlias from the hoop house. And of course, succulents. The eryngium, nigella, delphinium, acacia, and ranunculus came from our wholesaler.

About 5 weeks before their wedding date, I posted a photo on our IG of porcelain berries, one of our favorite things to forage at the end of the summer and Maggie commented on the photo saying how much she loved them and that if they were available in November, she would love to include them. I told her we’d try our best, although at the time I felt skeptical they’d still be around. Somehow, though, I managed to find a patch of the vine (at the end of a lane I never drive down) that was still going strong the week of their wedding. We cut it, we used it, and that Saturday night the temp dropped so low that it all died.

We hope that every fall, when Maggie and Dan get ready to celebrate their anniversary, they will notice the porcelain berries scattered down the highway, along the roadsides, and under railway bridges. A perennial reminder of the immense natural beauty of their special day.

All photos/video by Maggie Martin Photography

Summertime Flower Crown Workshop

Rocklands Farm

August 25, 2018 by Caitlin Robinson

Before this year, we arranged all our weddings underneath an awning up by the greenhouse, which meant that as soon as it was dark out, we either had to finish up for the night or move into the tiny blacksmith shop, lit only with a few hanging strands of bistro lights. Super romantic, obviously, but not ideal for working. When the opportunity came up for us to move into the old garage at the top of the driveway and transform it into our little studio, we were so excited to have a space to spread out, make a mess, blast our music, and gather with friends and clients. We also knew it would be such a fun and welcoming place to hold workshops.

We decided that a Friday night flower crown workshop would be a good place to start. And when friend and super talented portrait photographer Maggie Martin messaged me the morning of, asking if she might be able to come snap some photos, I didn’t even think twice about telling her to join us. Maggie, I can’t thank you enough for capturing this colorful, summertime gathering.

We look forward to opening up the workshop more next season, for learning and to further build this awesome community of fellow-flower lovers. Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom for the video!