“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ~ Albert Camus
I love this quote. I can’t deny a sense of sadness when summer is over, the swallows have left and the garden is feeling a bit like Cinderella at five to midnight, but there is so much still to be celebrated. The cut flower beds are still pumping out gorgeous blooms – dahlia, hydrangea and cosmos are only now really hitting their stride, plus there’s chrysanthemums, amaranthus, rudbeckia, aster and a whole host of others. Nature is offering all kinds of goodies – seeds, grass heads, autumn foliage, berries, all there for the picking.
If you have gone for an Autumn wedding, embrace the season and be bold with your colour palette – deep, rich wine reds, burnt oranges, softened with shades of apricot and peach. If you don’t feel that you want to go all deep colours, maybe use cream as your base colour (think Café au Lait dahlias), with apricot to warm it up a bit, some beautiful grass heads (the Pinterest-friendly Pampas Grass), and then maybe some deeper accents of burgundy.
I am a strong believer in using flowers, foliage and colour that are in season – they just look right. As the seasons change so does the light, and these shades work so well with the golden glow of low Autumn light.
This half arch was created using masses of autumnal foliage including vines and hop trails. There’s actually relatively little flower in it – most of the colour is coming from the foliage and trails of amaranthus (Love-Lies_Bleeding).