Thursday and Friday, I was invited to help a friend with wedding flowers for one of the celebrations; it was a great experience and I got to learn a lot about the plants and flowers that grow here. Having done plenty of flowers over the years I found it somewhat different but also very much the same.
When I joined my friend on Thursday, the glorious stars of the show (dozens of peonies) were waiting at the venue, safe inside the cool gloom of an old stone farm building. We spent several hours in a beautiful garden cutting swathes of heady lilac, bunches of fragrant, flowering herbs, honeysuckle and armfuls of feathery greenery while the sun shone steadily, warming the cool wind. After a few hours, it seemed there would be enough material to support the stars and the buckets were loaded into vehicles and taken the ten miles to the venue, a beautiful castle on the edge of a loch. Similar to this one...
Friday was devoted to the arrangements, many small ones for the dining tables and large, dramatic ones for the castle, church and marquee. Working in the lovely stone building, surrounded by the wonderful scent of flowers, was delightful and even though the sun was beating down, we were comfortably cool. Despite the huge trees that shaded the grounds, the day was so warm; we had to leave the flowers for the marquee stored safely inside the stone building, waiting for the cool of early morning to move them.
And Saturday was cool, cool and grey; in fact it was drizzling lightly. Maybe not the best of weather, but the whole venue looked lovely, the marquee was stunning and the joy of the celebration would have lit up the day anyway.
Back at home; another wedding was taking place at the pub, the second one this week! The couple had wanted a beach ceremony and our first indication that festivities had started was the sound of bagpipes drifting into the house. There were vintage cars for the wedding party, buses for the guests and kilted pipers for the music and then there was the rain. A traditional Scottish wedding…well, the weather is traditionally unpredictable. So, I guess that rain, sun, wind, whatever… well that’s tradition too!
