Picnic Wedding Celebrations

Photos by Nectarine Photography from A Cheeky Little Wedding – Part 2

A picnic for your wedding reception could be the answer for a more laidback celebration.

With warmer weather wedding plans for the Spring and Summer ahead, we can take advantage of the sunshine and outdoors. Choose a venue with shade or set up lots of shady areas with market umbrellas and portable awnings.

Photo by Leo Farrell from Anitra and Ben’s Relaxed Garden Wedding

To create a sense of occasion, have your guests enter the area through an archway or pergola of flower and vine entwined magnificence. Before them could be a landscape of wooden tables, picnic rugs, tables with food and tables decorated just to set the scene – in short a room in the outdoors. Arrange flowers as you would inside – not fragile hot house flowers, but garden and field flowers, seed pods, grasses, fruit, pine cones, twigs and branches arranged casually in a variety of containers.

Photo by Brent Lukey from Rosy and Tim’s Festive Melbourne Wedding

Keep your decorating rustic and whimsical – linen, heavy cottons, burlap, twine – not organza’s or silks! Look for vintage containers, zinc or copper urns, farmer’s implements, wooden crates, rustic faded furniture, old glass jars – mix and match to add to the seemingly effortless nature of the occasion. Tractors, rusted vintage machinery, ramshackle wooden buildings or sheds or simply a paddock with a grove of trees could be the perfect backdrop to this occasion. Try a marquee set up in the middle of a field of wheat. Mow a party area and a track to the marquee. Your entrance way could be an elaborately decorated farm gate. Or perhaps a dam edged in willows, with a jetty, could provide that ‘Wind in The Willows’ charm.

Photo by Imajica Photography from Rachel and Jarred’s Sydney Picnic Wedding

A picnic will give your guests an excuse to wear their prettiest summer dress or lighter clothes rather than be dressed in heavy suits and more formal clothes.

Photo by Bayly & Moore from Lisa and Shaun’s Whimsical Fremantle Wedding

Restaurant quality food could be served in baskets, pails, tiffins or on rustic crockery. Wait staff in formal black and white attire to serve elegant morsels will add a sense of occasion. If the venue is not near a house where the food can be prepared and stored, a marquee could serve as this central point. The bar could also be set up here, or in the shade of a large tree.