The Backyard Wedding: Check It, Haters

Amanda Thomsen

My sister and her boyfriend got engaged during the fireworks display on the 4th of July. By the 15th of the month, they had decided on a short engagement of three months; she wants babies (her clock is ticking) and he wants the tax write-off for 2014. These are the romantic foundations a strong marriage is built on. At least it’s realistic.

Around that same time, all traditional wedding venues had been ruled out as too tacky, expensive or locationally challenged. The bride had always wanted a backyard wedding so I opened up my yard and home to them. I had wanted a backyard wedding when I got married 10 years ago, but no one, friends, family or fiancé, would get on that crazy train with me. No one thought it was a sane idea or feasible in any way. So this challenge, a decade later, had me revved to prove the haters wrong.

I immediately set to “polishing a turd” as my dad calls it. I aimed myself to tidy a wild and previously somewhat neglected acre-plus (I have tidy gardens, but let the rest be as close to Mother Nature’s original plans as possible). My dad came over three days a week for three months and together we trimmed back natives and weeds that I liked the look of, but no one else would “get.” We felled a few trees—one was tangled just slightly in the power lines and our hearts danced with mischief and danger as that puppy fell.

My dad built a large arbor over the entrance to the yard; it was covered in a layer of chalkboard paint so that it could welcome guests to the big day, but for sure I’ll be writing things up there for other occasions. We power washed EVERYTHING—something I think is ridiculous unless you really are having a wedding at your house. I mean, how clean should it be outside? It’s nature, right? We spread 4 yards of mulch, we painted, planted and hauled. We sweated, bled, ached and I, personally, soaked in a cubic yard of Epsom salts in that three-month period. We burned stuff. A lot of stuff.

At the end, we set up strings of lights and used hay bales to hide areas we couldn’t make perfect. One area, in a prime traffic area, was super uneven due to a tree that came out years ago. Rotten roots give way in a quicksand-like fashion and I could just see someone in spiky heels getting sucked to their doom. And although it would serve anyone that would wear spiky heels to a backyard wedding right, I used 10 hay bales to create a “sofa” and covered it with blankets. I think it was one of the best seats in the house.

Then came the tents, tables, linens, flowers, chairs and dance floor. Did you know that dew collects on a dance floor, if placed under the stars, at about 6:00 p.m. on a September evening? Yeah, neither did the people who fell on their asters. Despite my drying it off with a beach towel, that thing was perilous! There were luminaria and paper lanterns in the trees, all lit with those snazzy LED flameless candles that last for over 100 hours.

The happy couple organized a food truck instead of the usual wedding nightmare food. Each place setting got a vintage punch cup (a quarter each, thrifted) filled with an on-trend succulent as a thank-you favor. They splurged on a few servers to keep up with the mess and a bartender to get the attendees properly drunk. There was a living room set up, purchased at the thrift store, set up in the lawn for the cigar smokers. Tiny bags of safflower seeds were forgotten as the bride and groom went back down the aisle, but were later spread by drunken guests. (I know this from the safflower seedlings in my lawn.) The groom made and expertly painted a set of “cornhole” platforms that were monogrammed in their chosen colors. And as the sun went down, tiny 1-inch glow sticks were added to cocktails and the kids all received glowing necklaces and everyone danced until they couldn’t
anymore.

In the end, it was things like the strings of extra fancy lights, the unicorn masks that made the rounds, the hay bale sofa and the funky thrift store furniture that really made it memorable and personal. Containers of annuals in every corner now are sentimental “wedding flowers” that my sister will seek to buy for years and years. Homemade custom cornhole and hand-drawn chalkboards lent their easy charm. All of it, lights aside, did not cost us much. For sure, a lot of elbow grease and experience went into it.

Scratch that. No one danced but me, but I danced hard enough for all of them. This backyard wedding was a success—Pinterest-worthy and memorable—all the haters were wrong. GP