A Garden Fête
for Marion's Sixtieth
Vendor guide · Bruton, Somerset
If you are reading only one part
- Florist
- Please do not bring flowers. The garden is the point — thirty-one years of
it — and almost nothing in it was bought. If anything is needed, it is cut from that garden on the
day. The plant list below is what actually grows there and it is the whole vocabulary.
- Anyone styling it
- There is no colour scheme and that is deliberate. Marion's
garden has never had one and neither does the paper. Please do not impose one — and above all not
dusty pink and sage green, which Marion calls “the wedding colours” and does not mean kindly.
- Signage / production
- The welcome sign goes on the gate onto the lane and will be out for
about eight hours in whatever June does. It needs to survive light rain — mount it and seal
it accordingly, and check it after the first shower.
- Caterer / planner
- Tables are named for the plants themselves, not numbered. Four
o'clock, casual, in the garden. Everything else is under Day-of notes.
The event
- Date
- Saturday, 5 June 2027
- From
- Four o'clock
- Where
- The Hales' garden
Bruton, Somerset
- The garden
- Their own, which is the whole point. A long double border down one side, about
forty metres, planted thickly and not very tidily; a brick path Marion laid herself.
- Guests
- 55
- Dress
- Casual, and meant
- Replies by
- 15 May 2027
The visual identity at a glance
Typefaces: Cormorant Garamond for the plant names, Hanken Grotesk for
everything a guest needs to read.
These are not a scheme — they are the colours of plants that are genuinely in that border, and they
are allowed to sit next to each other the way they do outside. Bright and slightly too much is right.
Coordinated is wrong.
Match to the printed piece, not to these squares. These are screen values, and the whole
thing will be seen outdoors at four o'clock in June, which lifts everything. If you are matching cloth
or ribbon, hold the real card — and better still, hold it next to the plant.
Stationery arriving
| Piece | Trim | Quantity |
|---|
| Invitation | 5 × 7″, deckled | one per household |
| Envelope + liner | to envelope size | as invitations |
| Save the date | 5 × 7″ | as invitations |
| Reply card | 4.25 × 5.5″ | one per household |
| Welcome sign | 24 × 36″ — weatherproof | 1 |
| Menu card | 4 × 9″ | 61 |
| Place cards | 2 × 3.5″ folded | 61 |
| Table names | 5 × 7″ | one per table |
| Thank you card | 4.25 × 5.5″ | one per household |
Counts are 55 guests plus a proofing
margin. “One per household” is the envelope count. The table count is not fixed yet — confirm it with
the studio before that piece prints, and remember the tables are named for plants.
Day-of notes
One thing to handle carefully. Douglas has copied out Marion's plant notebook, and
Marion does not know. She has spent thirty years thinking she is the one who gives things
away. Please do not mention the notebook, the cards, or where the plant names came from in front of
her before the day.
- The plants
- These, and only these — they are what is actually in the border:
foxglove · achillea · geranium · aquilegia · scabious · cornflower ·
hellebore · Solomon's seal · sweet pea
- Where they came from
- Almost nothing here was bought. Her mother's Solomon's seal. The
apricot foxgloves from the Ferrises next door. The mustard achillea Ruth carried home from Crete in
a shoe. A dark plum hellebore from a woman at a plant sale. That is the story the suite tells, and
it is why the tables carry plant names rather than numbers.
- The welcome sign
- On the gate onto the lane, out for about eight hours in June weather.
It must survive light rain.
- Material
- Digital press on uncoated natural stock with deckled edges. Nothing coated,
nothing that shines. The paper should feel like something that has been outside.
Please do not
- No roses, no peonies, no eucalyptus, no dried palm — nothing out of a florist's catalogue.
- No single colour scheme.
- Above all, not dusty pink and sage green. Marion calls it “the wedding colours”.
- Nothing that looks designed, coordinated, or like a wedding.
Douglas's own list. His standard: “It should look like a
June afternoon feels — bright and slightly too much.”
Questions about anything on this sheet
Ask the studio directly rather than working around a detail —
hello@evorrah.com. Artwork, vector files and colour references
for anything listed here can be sent to a supplier on request.