If you’ve done any research on wedding florists, eeeekkkks. It can get pretty pricey. From floral arrangements decorating the front of a church to aisle decorations, to bouquets, it blows my mind how much you can spend! The cheapest bouquets I found were in the $55-$75 dollar range, and of course they included carnations and other flowers that I am not so fond of. The nicer bouquets were in the price range of over $100 all the way to the $200 and $300 range.

What do you do instead for fear that your wedding will look bleak and lack decorations? First, let’s talk about location. GO OUTDOORS. Use the natural, ahem, free beauty of the great outdoors and have your wedding in a park or a forest. It took us months and months to find the perfect park location, devoid of eyesores such as playgrounds in the background, or public parks with too much traffic (people always around), or hefty fines and required permits by the city.

But, we finally found the perfect place in a little town called Yelm. The park was gorgeous, complete with beautiful landscape, towering evergreens, growing water reeds,

weeping willows, a lake with a fountain, flowering trees, and a little creeping brook at the entrance. Because it was in a tiny town, there wasn’t much traffic.

It even had a little dock where we took some pictures.

We ended up taking over the entire park,

using a little hill for the wedding ceremony, (the top of the hill was perfectly elevated to look like a stage!)

we gathered around a grove of towering trees for the reception, and we used all the remaining areas for private picture taking with just me and my groom.

PLUS, big PLUS… Being outdoors created the perfect backdrop for closeup pictures, where the scenery behind the sharpened object created a blurring, Monet like effect on the picture!

(Monet “The Clouds”)

Here are a couple of Nate and me:

Next, I’ll talk more about what do instead of buying premade bouquets…