If you saw my earlier post about this wedding, you might remember how excited I was about the gigantic dahlias. And indeed, they were great, but my favorite thing about this wedding was how when we arrived, lots of family and friends were bustling around putting it all together, not acting at all stressed or freaky but instead just relaxed and smiling, ready to celebrate Lisa and Cody together. So nice. Julie and I both wished we could have stuck around for the party — it looked like it was going to be a blast!

Here are a lot more gorgeous shots from their photographer, the exceedingly talented Emily Gutman. First my favorite, a portrait of the adorable couple and their hound… then some table florals, and more personal flowers at the end. If you want to see more, check out Emily’s blog!

There are certain plants and flowers I gravitate towards, and certain colors too; personally I tend to favor earthy, warm colors, which is why this is my favorite time of year. But I also always love when a client comes in with a color palette that challenges my thinking and pushes me in a different design direction. Shannon and Dominic wanted shades of deep peacock blue, vibrant chartreuse, and rich latte or mocha brown. Ultimately these colors worked so perfectly in the setting of their wedding, at Barndiva in Healdsburg, a restaurant with a gorgeous patio filled with vintage furnishings, old signs and rusty sculptures, with an enchanting overhang of trees and lights.

The concept was to do little clusters of old blue mason jars with apothecary bottles and some loose succulents and tillandsias scattered about. I chose a deep blue delphinium with bright kermit mums, purple majesty and frosted explosion grass, parchment-hued annabelle hydrangeas, blue and white nigella, and café au lait dahlias. Also a few dark brown fiddleheads here and there. (Full disclosure: the fiddleheads are (ack!) imported! A bride from the previous weekend’s wedding really, really wanted them and I just couldn’t find wild local ones to save my life. So we made an exception to our California-only rule. They worked so well with Shannon’s color palette that I used the extras here.)

We also used a lime-green geranium leaf; I’ve found this plant to be super finicky, but I couldn’t resist it for this color palette, with its slight rusty-brown tint. Lots of the stems didn’t make it, but we still used it as an accent here and there (and as a lovely cuff for Shannon’s bouquet, which I’ll have to show you once their official pics come through!).

I can’t claim to have had anything to do with this sweet detail, but I loved it so much that I had to share: instead of laying the place cards on the plates, they tied them to these lovely garden chairs with twine. Charming!

For their ceremony at a nearby winery, Shannon and Dominic wanted something a bit unusual for their “altarpiece,” so we created a display with birch branches, shimmery solar lanterns, and dangling tillandsias. The bridesmaids each carried a single café au lait dahlia down the aisle and left it in one of the little jars around the base of the blue pot.

This was a fun one. Hopefully I’ll have some more photos to post soon. I loved Shannon’s bouquet, can’t wait to share that with you!