Sweet And Simple Backyard Wedding

College sweethearts, Dara and Andy, wanted to keep their wedding sweet, personal, and intimate. The first step was choosing a wedding venue near and dear to their hearts… the bride’s backyard. They kept the guest list to people they personally knew to inspire a warm and comfortable atmosphere.

Keep reading to get the scoop on the personal details and yard games. Oh, and the bit about her father’s tie might lead to a few happy tears. Don’t say we didn’t warn you! See all the DIY details from this sweet and simple backyard wedding in all their glory in the full gallery here, photographed by The Markows.

Words from The bride

It was perfect that my dream venue had been out my backdoor for my entire childhood. We decided to ask my parents to get married in our backyard and the hay field immediately behind it. Thankfully they were thrilled and helped with so many aspects of the wedding. It would have never come together without their help, support, and of course, their home.

Advice from the bride

My best advice if you’re still planning is let your bridesmaids wear whatever dress they want but in a certain color palette. I recommend giving them a swatch to match. As you can see in the photos, most of my bridesmaids hit the mark with a blush dress but it was kind of stressful not having an exact color to match. Many of my ladies didn’t end up getting a dress until a week or so before the wedding. In the end, it didn’t really matter what colors they wore, but it would have saved us some stress if I just gave them a swatch and asked if they would get something close to it.

How to connect with your venue

In the middle of the field is a single black walnut tree. Farmers would put one tree in the center of the field so they had shade to rest under when it was time to take a break and eat lunch. We decided to get married under this tree and to leave it without decoration. It was important to us to let the natural beauty of the land speak for itself so our wedding mantra was simplify. We used this tree as a sort of theme for the wedding and chose a guestbook where guests could use their fingerprints to fill in the leaves in colors that matched the black walnut tree. We also decided to give “mini trees” to our guests as favors in the form of mini succulents with DIY “thanks” flags and DIY painted mini pots. I wanted my flowers and the centerpieces to look like we picked them that day out of the field to connect back to our place, which really set the theme for our entire day.

A big lesson I learned is that other people have lots of feelings about your wedding, and rightfully so. I had to think about the experience from the perspective of the other people my wedding was impacting like my close friends and my parents. For example, I wanted to walk down the aisle by myself at first because I didn’t like the historical tradition of a bride being transferred from one man to another. When I told my mom this she told me that even if that was historically true, I needed to remember that my dad might want to walk me down the aisle. In the end, I had both my parents walk me down the aisle to honor the role they both played in making me the person I am today and to change what the tradition meant and respect the feelings of my parents.

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