Emma and Rourke’s pretty, natural-themed wedding focused on family, fun and a relaxed vibe…

We chose to have our wedding from start to finish at Meadowood Boutique Accommodation and Venue located in Fernhill, Hawke’s Bay. We fell in love with its twinkling tree top lights and abundance of nature. The natural environment helped to bring out the relaxed, rustic theme that we were going for and having onsite accommodation meant our wedding party and some out-of-town family members were able to stay with us. This led to an exciting day before, as we ran around doing the finishing touches and ended the night with some social board games and spa soaking. It was like a giant sleepover with your favourite people.

We decided to have our ceremony under the beautiful canopy of the trees, which was a good choice in hindsight as it began to lightly rain when the ceremony started. They say it’s good luck to have rain on your wedding as well, with an overcast day being great for photos. We wanted all our immediate family members to have a sense of inclusion in our ceremony, starting with my dad walking me, and Rourke walking with his mum up the aisle. All our siblings were in our wedding party, our mums wrote poems to speak during the ceremony, and we had my sister and Rourke’s dad as our witnesses. A sign language interpreter was also present from the ceremony to the speeches, making sure that Rourke’s step mum felt a sense of inclusion. We wrote our own custom vows supported by our wonderful celebrant Viv Pearse, weaving a story of our relationship for our guests, which brought out much laughter.

We wanted to put our wedding budget towards meaningful items and chose a lot of items we would reuse, resell or were purchased second hand. This helped to support the rustic theme we had chosen and also worked with the furniture already at the venue. One of my bridesmaid’s mum has a beautiful garden full of gorgeous greenery and flowers, and she’d been saving them especially for our wedding. She helped to create my bouquet, which brought a personalised touch and strengthened the sense of family involvement that we love. Our wedding party came through in the weeks leading up to the big day, helping bring together place settings, flower design, signage, washing jars, folding napkins and more.

My mum, in her true crafty environment, turned the guest book signing table into a whole scrap booking station filled with props, stickers, pens, scissors and all our guests could create a personalised message.

Rourke really wanted to utilise the amazing natural baking talents of his side of the family and placed upon them the special task of creating our wedding cake as well as the food for the high tea. High tea is a special tradition for us to celebrate the milestones in our life so we decided to have our wedding earlier on in the day and included time between the ceremony and the reception to have a wandering high tea for the guests. Many family recipes were whipped out to make this happen. The wedding cake, a traditional Hungarian cake called ‘Dobos Torte’ was the main attraction of the high tea. Rourke’s mum , sister, nan and family friend spent the entire week pre-wedding creating three of these delicious cakes.

After the moving speeches and delicious food it was time for our first dance. For this we wanted to give our guests a little surprise, keeping our dance fun and light-hearted. We chose to perform ‘The Pumpkin Dance’ to the tune of Ghostbusters, which tied in with wedding date being Friday 13th. We pretend to start the dance to classic lovely-dovey music, then bam! With a sharp record scratch we got into position and the Ghostbusters song began to play. It was hard not to laugh as we heard a lot of gasps from the crowd. The fun and joking mood continued as we ended with the famous shoe game. The night ended with some dancing and a grazing dessert platter provided by Rourke’s family.

We loved spending our day celebrating our love story and coming together with both of our families and friends. There is nothing quite like having all the people who mean the most to both of you all in the same place at the same time for what may be the only time.