I recently joined a professional networking group, the Snohomish Wedding Guild (SWG). The SWG resides in Snohomish, WA and includes wedding vendors in all categories: venues, caterers, planners, florists, officiants, hair and make-up, deejays, rentals, and so on. While the Guild is open to all businesses, venues and event spaces have to be physically located in Snohomish County.

Every year the Snohomish Wedding Guild hosts the Snohomish Wedding Tour, a self-directed tour of multiple Snohomish venues, each venue with a team of exhibiting vendors. It’s an incredible display of professionalism, talent, and creativity. It’s a wonderful opportunity for couples who are thinking of having their wedding in Snohomish County to meet with potential vendors in person and to get a feel for their style and personality.

I attended the Snohomish Wedding Tour this year as a guest and the first venue I visited was Twin Willow Gardens, which I fell in love with immediately. What an absolutely stunning location! At Twin Willow Gardens forest paths lead to gorgeous flower gardens and a tented reception area sits in the center of the gardens. There is also a full cement patio with a beautiful antique firehouse door backdrop. The beautiful outdoor setting actually reminded me of my own wedding, which was held outdoors in Colorado. I was flooding me with the fondest, most wonderful memories.

The Cedar Chapel, the main ceremony space at Twin Willow Gardens, is down a wooded path that leads to an opening with a large, hand-crafted wood beam arch centered in the back. This ceremony space is absolutely magical – you feel like you are in an enchanted forest! I was so inspired by this beautiful ceremony setting that I sketched out several potential floral backdrop ideas. The ideas just kept coming! I hope you also fall in love with this ceremony space and are inspired by the feeling of this stunning place just as much as I was.

 

Enchanted Forest Floral Lunaria Tree

For this backdrop I decided to “re-grow” the tree to the left of the arch by creating a “trunk” made of Combo roses, Quicksand roses, Champagne sweetheart roses, mood moss, and sheet moss. The branches would be made from curly willow and adorned with dried lunaria and fairy lights. I had come across a lunaria backdrop once in a wedding blog and was taken aback with its strikingly simplistic beauty. From that moment I, too, wanted to create something amazing with dried lunaria! And how perfect would a lunaria tree be at Twin Willow Gardens?? The cedar wood arch would get a lovely curtain of Spanish moss, white astilbe (you could also use Queen Anne’s Lace, Pepper Grass, or False Spirea), and ribbon, with Champagne rose blooms attached at the bottom of the ribbon strands.

Enchanted Forest Floral Willow Tree

I actually did this sketch before the dried lunaria tree. I thought it would be fun and oh-so-fitting to create a willow tree for Twin Willow Gardens. Instead of dried lunaria fixed to the curly willow branches I would use willow eucalyptus. An asymmetric floral curtain would hang from the arch behind the tree.

Enchanted Forest Illumination

I love the look of old growth, undisturbed forest. To achieve a natural shape of growth movement I saw the cedar arch covered in moss, branches, and fairy lights. The curly willow would start from the ground and climb up the arch. Floral clusters would wind their way up the tree trunks, but also go part-way up the arch. The arch would be covered with a base of mood moss and sheet moss. Spanish moss and white delphinium would hang down from the top beam.

Patterned Quilt Inspiration

For some reason when I looked at the cedar arch structure I also envisioned a quilt. Probably because it has such a solid, rectangular shape. While I personally tend to gravitate towards asymmetric designs, I decided to sketch out a quilt-inspired pattern created from floral pomander balls, illuminated grapevine balls, and chevron-style lines of hanging delphinium, stock, and spray roses. The wood beams of the arch would be covered in mood moss, sheet moss, and rose blooms.

Diagonal Dried Lunaria

For this last sketch I decided to go with a very simple design, which goes against my tendency to incorporate lots of texture and lots of movement. Fairly recently in a wedding publication I had come across a backdrop of dried lunaria in the shape of a curtain. It was absolutely gorgeous and ignited a love of dried lunaria in me. In following the sharp angles of the cedar arch, I decided to split the arch into two pieces with a diagonal piece of wood, wedged in between two corners. Dried lunaria would stick out from either side of the diagonal piece of wood. This would be a modern, artistic interpretation of a feather or perhaps even of a fern.

 

So which ceremony design do you resonate most with?? Are there other colors/shapes you would like to see? Let’s see what show-stopper we can create together!