Your garden is the place to go if you’re on a budget or want to organize an eco-friendly wedding. Garden weddings have been popular since the dawn of time. The nicest part about having a backyard wedding is that you can save a lot of money on the wedding location because it is your own. Yes, if you have your wedding in your garden, you won’t have to pay anything for the venue.
Today, I’m going to share some outdoor party decoration ideas with you based on my personal experience. Plus, as a bonus, I’ll send you Free Orange Tropical Flower Watercolor Invitations! So, have a look at this one!
Garden Themed Wedding Ideas
I wanted to make everyone feel at ease and welcome from the time they came. So I made a wooden welcome sign for our visitors with a hand-painted greeting. We were also able to paint a cute departure message and a galvanized bucket of white light sticks to help people navigate our semi-dark street safely, owing to the sandwich-board design (two pieces of wood fastened with simple hinges at the top). We also built the sign and bought the glow sticks in bulk for less than $30 total.
We wanted a festive and enjoyable event, therefore we took great care in setting the tables. And, while our DIY method undoubtedly saved us thousands of dollars, we really did everything ourselves and spent months putting everything together.
Our celebration was everything but traditional, save from the tables and chairs we rented from a local vendor.
The tablecloths and runners were made of white muslin and textured yellow fabric from a local fabric store, and the glassware was mostly bought at Ikea.
We immediately recognized that purchasing these goods rather than renting them was a better deal, and we were able to create a more personalized design without having to worry about costs for staining, ripping, or breaking anything. Sam’s Club supplied the silverware as well. We then donated a lot of the servingware to charity, which felt great and was also a tax write-off!
We saved hundreds of dollars by opting for fruit over flowers and using centerpieces we could easily put together ourselves. Michael’s had the glass cylinders for the fruit centerpieces for $3.99 each, and we found roughly 200 glass votives on Craigslist, where a past bride had sold them all for $30 after scarcely using them.
Target even had festive lemon & lime paper napkins with a vibrant citrus motif that matched our lemon and lime centerpieces wonderfully.
Our garden-themed favors were simple brown tiny paper bags from Target that each carried a single gladiolus bulb for our guests’ gardens and included easy planting instructions on the back of each bag. Another photo with my husband’s face covered in lipstick kisses and us holding signs was clipped to the front of the bag.
I also made place cards for each visitor by hand stamping their first initial on a little square of cardstock, hand printing their whole name underneath, and fastening each card with a river pebble (which we purchased in bulk from Target).
Many guests retained their cards, and even their rocks, as a reminder that simple may be just as lovely as expensive handwriting and ribbons.
We had a plethora of beverage containers on hand as well. We wanted the polished look of glass instead of plastic pitchers, so we contacted a local wine shop to conserve some old bottles for us. We hand-labeled each with a sharpie once we got them home, making sure they were squeaky clean.
We filled the green bottles with water, the brown bottles with sweet tea, and the clear bottles with homemade mint lemonade. We also had a few red and white wine bottles on hand, as well as some old Coca-Cola glass bottles.
We also had a handful of red and white wine bottles on hand, as well as some of those cute vintage Coca-Cola glass bottles. We believe that avoiding cans and plastic made the event feel a little more special and distinguished it from a typical backyard barbecue.
When we came up with the photobooth idea, we were also trying to think of something entertaining to introduce for entertainment value. We tried for months to find something local, then something not-so-local, but we were unsuccessful.
However, approximately three months prior to the wedding, a beautiful local girl named Lisa-Ann opened a brand new photo booth rental business in Richmond, and we were one of her first customers. The photo booth was a luxury at $1200 for the day (which included unlimited photostrips and an on-site attendant to keep the booth operating), but the hilarious strips of our friends and family having a good time in the booth are one of our favorite memories.
To entice folks to leave us a few photostrips. We made the ultimate over-sized magnet board out of our large red metal garage door. It only needed a few cheap magnets and a simple reminder to keep some photostrips for us. We ended up with more photostrips than guests, which was a pleasant surprise.
We also sought to earn some brownie points with our lovely visitors by paying attention to the small details that would make them feel more at ease. This included handing out free flip-flops to guests whose footwear was a little too formal for a garden wedding. We also wanted the dollar store flip flops to match the sentiment, so we tied pairs of them together with rustic twine and stuffed them into a burlap basket for easy access.
We also added a practical and cost-effective twist to the conventional wedding slideshow because we couldn’t afford a large projector.
We made a clothesline version by tying yarn between two five-foot garden hooks and clipping the pictorial story of us growing up, meeting, and falling in love with gorgeous wooden clothespins. This project cost less than $20, yet it kept guests interested as they waited for their photobooth moment. Friends and family members are still talking about it.
The lighting was one feature we couldn’t miss. We knew that the perfect amount of light in the appropriate places would transform our backyard barbecue into an elegant outdoor party, so we went all out. For soft lighting, votives were placed on the tables.
Around the perimeter, there were a few lighting torches for amusement. Candles were also placed in ancient jars that functioned as miniature hurricanes filled with sand that lined the entire driveway. Jars of jam, pickles, and pasta sauce were kept for over a year.
Free Orange Tropical Flower Watercolor Wedding Invitations
As always, in every wedding plan I made I also give you free invitations to my lovely readers. And today I’m gonna share with you Free Orange Tropical Flower Watercolor Invitations to help you host your dream wedding without breaking the bank.
Download Help
- Right-Click each one of your selection
- Then select “Save Image As”, locate where you want the file to be saved in your device.
- Click “Save”, or tap “Enter”, and the download process will start shortly.
You can spend more time decorating your party or preparing your food if you use our free invitations. It will also make your budget appear to be smaller.
