Rooted in Love: Kayla & Jack's Intimate Garden Wedding in Speyside
"I'm not interested in a wedding, I'm invested in the marriage." When Kayla said this to me during our planning, I knew this would be a ceremony unlike any other. It might honestly be the wisest thing a bride has ever said to me, and it captured perfectly the spirit of the day we would go on to create together.
Kayla found me through Instagram with a vision that was more feeling than plan: Scotland, small, intimate, no fuss. The venue they chose could not have been more perfect. The wonderfully quirky Hideaway under the Stars is a funky hobbit-house-style retreat just outside Aberlour in Speyside, wrapped in its own beautiful garden. And on a gloriously sunny, warm late spring day, Kayla's dream of a laid-back outdoor ceremony came true, exactly as she had imagined it.
From the very beginning Monika helped with amazing location ideas and suggestions which ended up forging the most magical day of my life. A small scale intimate day, just the two of us, our two children, two dogs and my now in laws. Held outside of the most beautiful Hobbit House nr Aberlour. Monika took my breath away with what she bought to the table, she had prepared the most touching and perfectly suited ceremony which encased the whole feel of us and our story so far.
We asked for no fuss and short and sweet, Monika bought a calm and peaceful presence and the words she wrote for the ceremony touched us all. We are forever grateful for not only your guidance and knowledge during the planning stages but also the way you seemed to just get us and were able to capture us in a way I thought that we both could only feel. You helped me create a vision that I wasn’t sure was possible and it was a day of joy, peace, connection and calm, forever etched into our minds as our journey continues forward. More than I could have ever wished for and feeling full of love and forever grateful ❤️
Kayla & Jack
Everything about the day was designed around one principle: being present. The photographs had been taken days before, precisely so nobody had to pose for anything. There was no timetable, no receiving line, no speeches, just a blessing for two people who live with their feet on the earth, wishing them fertile land and kind seasons, dogs underfoot, bees in the blossom, and time to look at the stars together, just as they did at the very beginning. And afterwards? A family walk down to the waterfall.
Their words afterwards moved me deeply: "It was a day of joy, peace, connection and calm, forever etched into our minds as our journey continues forward. More than I could have ever wished for."
Kayla and Jack, thank you for trusting me with your story. Go now and live the life you have imagined. You planted it, now watch it grow.
There were seven of us in that garden: Kayla and Jack, their two boys, Jack's parents, and me, plus the four-legged family members, who were, of course, at the very heart of it all. Because this was never a party with a ceremony attached. It was the step into marriage, witnessed only by the small circle who had been part of it all along.
We began the ceremony by simply taking a breath and looking around: a garden in the Highlands, no schedule to keep, no crowd to entertain, and nowhere else anyone needed to be. That set the tone for everything that followed. Kayla and Jack's love story is one of deep roots rather than fireworks, a slow, patient growing-together over some fifteen years that has quietly become a family, a life, and a shared vision of a future lived close to nature and close to each other. Today wasn't a dramatic turning point for them; it was a harvest, and a planting, done deliberately, with open eyes, by two people who know exactly what they're choosing.
That theme of roots ran through the whole ceremony. We shared Louis de Bernières' beautiful words on love, "those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground… they find that they are one tree and not two", words that could have been written for these two. They exchanged rings with promises of "everything we are growing together," and saved their personal vows for a private moment later, just the two of them, because some promises don't need an audience.
