Your event identity — everything came from somebody

Everything you have been sent is built from a very small number of decisions. They are written down here so that anything you make yourselves — a label at the gate, a card by a plant somebody asks about — still belongs to the same afternoon.

The colours

There is no colour scheme, and that is the decision rather than the absence of one. Marion’s garden has never had one in thirty-one years and neither does this. The colours are the plants that are actually in it — apricot foxglove, mustard achillea, the brick of the path — and they are allowed to sit next to each other the way they do outside.

June light — the sheet itself
#F9EED6
Notebook ink — every word
#3A352D
Apricot foxglove
#A0472F
Ruth’s achillea, carried from Crete
#B8934E
Brick path
#C0A98A
Bruton stone
#EDE9E1

The two typefaces

A Garden Fête for Marion's Sixtieth
Cormorant Garamond — the names of the plants and the one line at the top of a piece.
The Hales' garden
Hanken Grotesk — times, the address, what is being eaten, and the note for people who are asking.

The one mark

The mark is her own handwriting. Almost nothing in this garden was bought: every plant came from somebody — a cutting, a split root, a paper bag of seed pushed across a kitchen table. Her mother’s Solomon’s seal. The apricot foxgloves from next door. The achillea Ruth carried home from Crete in a shoe. Marion has written all of it down for thirty years, and the suite is drawn from that notebook.

Digital press on uncoated natural stock with deckled edges. Nothing coated, nothing that shines — it is a garden in June, at four in the afternoon, and the paper should feel like something that has been outside.

Your suite

Invitation
Save the date
Rsvp card
Envelope liner
Menu card
Place card
Table names
Welcome sign
Thank you

Using it yourselves

This is your event's visual identity. If you make anything yourselves, use these exact colours and these two typefaces — the restraint is the design.

The colours, to copy

#F9EED6 · #3A352D · #A0472F · #B8934E · #C0A98A · #EDE9E1

June light — the sheet itself · Notebook ink — every word · Apricot foxglove · Ruth’s achillea, carried from Crete · Brick path · Bruton stone, in that order.

The two typefaces, and where to get them

Cormorant Garamond and Hanken Grotesk are both free and open-source, and both are on Google Fonts — search the name, install the family, or pick it straight from the font menu in Canva, Google Docs or Word. You do not need a licence and you do not need to ask us.

5 rules, if you make something new
  1. No colour scheme. Colours are plants that are really in the garden, and they may clash.
  2. Only cottage plants, and only ones growing there: foxglove, achillea, geranium, aquilegia, scabious, cornflower, hellebore, Solomon’s seal, sweet pea.
  3. The tables are named for the plants themselves, not numbered.
  4. Bright and slightly too much. Overgrown is right; tidy and coordinated is wrong.
  5. The handwriting is hers. Do not straighten it, re-set it, or replace it with a script face.

Your locked palette is the source of these, and the ones beyond it were read off your delivered pieces — if you want those confirmed against the press proof, ask the studio.