Green Wedding Natural Nuptials

Seven green ways to personalise your wedding day - Day 4

Only a few days to go before the Spring Equinox and Earth Day on April 22nd, so we thought it an appropriate time to highlight seven green ways to personalise your wedding day. On day four we suggest you:

CELEBRATE
Your love for one another by choosing a personalised ceremony, in line with your own beliefs. This can mean heaps more to most couples than the 'standard' one conducted by the registrar. The ceremony could be as simple as standing amongst family and friends to proclaim your committment to one another. You could use symbolic elements from traditional ceremonies like the Handfasting, an old English marriage ceremony where your hands are symbolically tied together with ribbons. Or you could choose a ceremony from the country of your origin somewhere else in the world, combining your different backgrounds.

However you choose to conduct your eco wedding ceremony, whether it's in a beautiful wood, under a special tree, a spot on the beach, in your favourite room or even the place in the city that means the most to you, it will be meaningful and personal to you both.

Our directory of wedding venues has some fantastic places where you could choose to hold your earth friendly wedding ceremony. And they are all run by beautiful people too!

Posted in Green Wedding Inspiration , Natural Nuptials

Did you throw a green wedding?

If you threw and green wedding last year and you've got some gorgeous photos of the day then please get in touch with us. We have a writer for Red Magazine looking for a truly eco chic wedding with earth friendly details to use in her article championing the rise of green celebrations. Email us on info@greenunion.co.uk and we will call you back.

Posted in Green Wedding Natural Nuptials , Press

A green Christmas wedding

Esther and Nigel were married a few days before Christmas at a gorgeous self catering venue, Huntsham Court near Exeter in Devon, England.

For Esther, environmental issues are very important in both her work and personal life, so a green wedding was the obvious choice. They hired a self catering venue and did it all themselves, calling on friends and family whose combined fashion, design and cookery skills ensured the eco was chic too.

The wedding feast was created by a local catering company whose fabulous menu was made up entirely from locally grown seasonal produce based on regional recipes with wine from a Cornish vineyard. The whole house was decorated with candles and foliage collected from the hedgerows and venue grounds, while Esther's bouquet was made up of mistletoe which is imbued with the ancient mysticism of vitality and fertility, a symbol for peace and a message for loved ones.

What's more, this wonderfully earth friendly wedding, apart from treading lightly on our planet, was very light on the bank balance which gave Esther and Nigel something to celebrate!

You can read more about Esther and Nigel's wedding story, and what Esther herself has to say about it here.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratualte Esther and Nigel on the arrival of their very precious Juno.

Posted in Green Wedding Natural Nuptials

Vineeta & Tom

Vineeta & Tom have just begun to plan their wedding and will be filling us in, from time to time, with the ups and downs, highs and lows of throwing an eco wedding in Cornwall.

Wedding date: 9 May 2008
Wedding Venue: Bedruthan Steps Hotel, Cornwall, UK

How many guests are coming to your wedding and where from?
We have around 60 wedding guests and most of them are from the UK. Our friends who live in the UK, Tom's first family and a few relatives will be at the wedding. My parents who live in Dubai and my sister from India will also be there. Since our friends and family are scattered around the Midlands and the South of England, we thought Cornwall will be a good place to choose.

I also have a very large number of relatives in India, so to avoid excessive CO2 emmissions by travel, Tom and I have planned another celebration in India in the year 2009. We will travel there, so discouraging another 100 people from flying to UK.

Also we are getting married on a Friday, which has made our guests plan a weekend break in Cornwall.

Do you have a budget and do you think you'll be able to stick to it?
Yes we do and we believe that we will be able to stick to our budget, and being green hasn't made it any more expensive.

Why is it important to you to throw an eco-wedding? What inspired you?
An eco-wedding was the first thing on our minds when we thought of getting married. Tom and I love the outdoors and we enjoy being close to nature. We would love to start our married life with a positive impact, or neutral effect on the climate.

Please can you tell us a little about the eco-elements of your wedding.
We have decided to use a local florist, Stephanie who encourages the use of local flowers. We are using natural shells for table decorations and most of these shells that our decorator Jo is using are from her own wedding, hence reuse rather than buying new ones. The shells are to reflect the seaside theme of the wedding.

About clothes, we are trying to find clothes from The Dressmarket. At the same time, Tom and I believe in wearing something fun, rather than traditional, since it is a civil ceremony. Although we think wedding dresses are really beautiful, they somehow cannot be reused in our own life, so should be sold or passed on. Rather than buying an organic wedding dress that can only be worn for 10 hours on your wedding day, we are planning to buy clothes which we might be able to use again, for special occasions.

The venue that we have selected has been chosen as a Green Tourism Award winner, and they offer an opportunity to guests to offset their carbon footprint. We're happy that they encourage the use of local and organic food. They use low energy lighting and their environmental policies make us really happy to be holding our wedding at Bedruthan Steps Hotel.

Do you think it's easy to be both stylish and green on your wedding day?
It's interesting for us to find environmentally friendly alternatives. We certainly don't need to be unstylish to be green. In fact there are many designers, florists and decorators who are into green living. That means that the fashion industry is making a new way to greener life. All the elements we are planning, according to us, are really stylish.

Have you got any tips, so far, for other brides looking to throw an eco-wedding?
Follow your heart, if you want to have a green wedding, just have one. Don't worry about what your families will think of you and who won't follow you. If you believe in having a green wedding there are a lot of people that can help you achieve it and it's no more expensive to plan a green wedding than a normal one.

It is just very important that we take a stand, to encourage wedding suppliers to make their services much more environmentally friendly. The more people support green issues, the more people will produce things with less environmental impact.

Posted in Green Wedding Natural Nuptials

Now here's a story to warm the heart

This weekend a couple from Cornwall in the West Country of England are planning to have as green a wedding as possible and it certainly isn't going to cost the earth. Russell and Alexia met at a series of Climate Change events so when they decided to marry it was only natural that they would throw an eco friendly wedding.

They say its a simpler way of doing it and keeps sight of the real meaning of marriage, which is love and the promise of your new future as husband and wife.

Invitations were sent online, any printing they've had done is by a local printer with vegetable dyes on recycled paper. Their rings are made locally of wood from a salvaged tree, the food has all be sourced within the area, the toast will be in Cornish sparkling wine, their outfits have been sourced from charity shops and adapted to their own styles by a talented seamstress, the guests are encouraged to car share and the reception is only a five minute walk from the church. Lexi's Mum has made some intriguing flowers out of saved plastic bags and collected spring blossom has been dried for the confetti. They have even decided to give their guests low energy light bulbs as wedding favours!

And best of all, the whole celebration will come in way below the average cost of getting married in the UK which is now estimated to be around £18,000.

Read the whole story by Louise Walter over on the BBC website.

Posted in Green Wedding Natural Nuptials , News

A bicycle made for two

Mandy and Jonathan, who kept us up to date here at GreenUnion HQ about their wedding preparations, were married in May and here's an extract from an original article about their wedding by Julie Lastarade for French Elle on 4 June 2007 and translated for us by our partner Diane who runs covert cabin in the Perigord Vert region of France - the ultimate in honeymoon hideaways.

The greenest day of their lives

Dress made of fairtrade cotton, guests discouraged to come by car. In England, the eco-chic are getting married in the same way they live their lives, by respecting the planet. And from these good principles real businesses are emerging.