Foliage men, Morris dancing, and a treehouse at this Pagan woodland wedding

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The Offbeat Bride: Magda, co-founder and editor

Her offbeat partner: Pad, health and safety partner

Date and location of wedding: Wise Weddings, Whetstead Farm, Kent, UK — September 26, 2015

Tell us about your wedding:

Our pub landlord, a druid with endless supplies of mead, hosted our handfasting and Pagan woodland wedding, permitting us to break with tradition by inviting all guests to jump over our Pagan besom if they chose.

We had two main challenges: food and weather. We had blue skies all day, but booked a second marquee anyway, as sitting on hay bales outdoors in the rain kinda sucks. I’d swapped my Dorothy red glitter heels for Doc Martens by this point, ready for a first dance wielding big sticks with our local Border Morris side.

My Best Woman pre-cooked a giant one-pot veggie chilli, ready to reheat the next day with support from volunteer food elves. We hired the catering equipment (tea urn, recycled cutlery, and gas bottle cooker).

A wedding cake was replaced with traybakes, and we invited guests to bring potluck salads.

Chalkboard table names featured our fave fictional places to see if guests could spot them all. A lovely friend who’d made our dried flower wedding bouquets put the leftover flowers in jam jars on tables laid out with "elven" fallen woodland birch. The wood lent itself to free fun. Friends hosted a kids’ treasure hunt, and things got heated over a Viking game of Kubb.

Music supplied by friends was an eclectic mix of jazz, post-punk, trip-hop, English barn dancing, and the groom’s band playing their FIRST EVER gig! Event programmes doubled as wedding favours, with each entertainment announced by the ringing of an old school bell. Then people jammed around the fire into the night.

Vendors

• Photography: Simon Bird
• Dress: Arc
• Hair/makeup: Black Cherry Vintage Hair & Beauty
• Hop buttonholes: Essentially Hops
• Ceremony: Archbishop’s Palace
• Reception: Wise Weddings
• Flowers: The Dried Flower Farm
• Catering: In for a Penny Cooking
• Recipe: Veggie chilli for 200
• Traybakes: Tray Delicious
• Band: Moth
• Band: Stone Heroes
• Band: Silk Road
• Band: A2 barn dance band