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Wedding gardens
The Wedding Garden
Designed like a show garden. Planned like an event. Made to last.
Create an unforgettable setting for your wedding at home, and a beautiful garden to enjoy for years afterwards.
A wedding at home can be incredibly personal. Instead of investing solely in a venue that you enjoy for one day, part of that investment can transform the garden around your own home, creating the setting for your celebration while leaving you with something beautiful long after the last guest has gone.
I create bespoke Wedding Gardens for private homes across Surrey and the Home Counties, combining permanent garden design with the very particular demands of an important event.
With more than 15 years of experience in event management, alongside my work as an award-winning show garden and residential garden designer, I bring together three disciplines that rarely sit under one roof.
The result is not simply a garden decorated for a wedding.
It is a garden designed around one extraordinary day, and the life that follows.
Where Garden Design Meets Event Design
A successful wedding garden has to do much more than look beautiful.
Guests need to arrive and move comfortably through the space. The ceremony needs the right backdrop. Entertaining areas need to work practically. Caterers, musicians and suppliers need discreet access. Lighting needs to transform the atmosphere as evening arrives.
And, of course, the garden has to look wonderful in photographs.
My background in event management means these practical considerations are understood from the beginning of the design process, not added as an afterthought.
I consider elements such as guest circulation, ceremony locations, dining and entertaining spaces, marquee positions, supplier access, photography viewpoints, evening lighting, privacy and wet-weather contingencies alongside the permanent landscape design.
Show Garden Thinking. Designed for Real Life.
Creating an RHS or major show garden has surprising similarities to designing a garden for a wedding.
There is one immovable date.
Every detail has to come together at exactly the right moment.
Planting needs to perform beautifully. Views and focal points must be carefully considered. Construction needs to run to a precise programme. The garden needs to work for large numbers of visitors and look exceptional from every important viewpoint.
Drawing on my award-winning show garden experience, I bring that same level of planning, attention to detail and creativity to a Wedding Garden.
There is, however, one very important difference.
A show garden lasts for a few days. Your Wedding Garden stays with you.
One Garden. Two Purposes.
Every major element is considered both for the wedding day and for life afterwards.
The pergola beneath which you exchange your vows might later become your outdoor dining room.
The path you walk down on your wedding day becomes the route you take through the garden every morning.
A terrace created for drinks and celebrations becomes the place where friends gather for summer dinners.
A specimen tree planted to mark the occasion grows alongside your marriage and your family.
Wedding lighting becomes permanent garden lighting.
And carefully planned planting continues to change and mature long after the wedding photographs have been taken.
The wedding becomes part of the story of the garden.
Planting for the Perfect Moment
One of the most exciting aspects of designing a Wedding Garden is working towards a particular date.
Where timescales allow, I can select and plan planting around the season of the wedding, creating combinations of colour, fragrance, texture and movement that reach their best around the celebration.
Roses, flowering perennials, ornamental grasses, climbers, flowering trees and carefully positioned containers can create natural ceremony backdrops and beautiful photographic settings without relying entirely on temporary floral decoration.
The garden still needs to work throughout the year, however, so I design the planting scheme with four-season structure and long-term resilience in mind.
The aim is not to create a garden that looks good for one weekend.
It is to create a beautiful permanent garden that happens to look particularly magical on one very important day.
From Show Garden to Wedding Garden
Beautifully crafted show-garden elements often have remarkably short first lives.
Where suitable, I can source and reimagine exceptional features originally created for RHS and other prestigious show gardens, from sculptural pergolas and screens to seating, planters, stone, specimen plants and bespoke garden structures.
A feature created for a show garden can begin a completely new chapter within a private landscape.
A pavilion admired by thousands of visitors might become the setting for a wedding ceremony, and later the place where a family gathers for dinner.
It is a creative way of giving beautifully made objects a meaningful second life, while bringing something genuinely unusual into the garden.
Planning a Wedding at Home?
Whether you are a couple planning your own wedding or parents preparing your family home for your son or daughter’s celebration, I would love to help you explore what could be possible.
Ideally, the conversation begins well in advance of the wedding date, allowing enough time for design, construction and planting to establish beautifully.
Wedding Garden Design is available across Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Berkshire, Kent, South West London and the wider Home Counties, with selected projects further afield.
Begin with a complimentary discovery call
We can talk about your wedding plans, your existing garden, your timescales and what you would love the garden to become afterwards.
One extraordinary day. One garden for life.
Let's talk about your garden
A free conversation about your space, with no obligation.