We love a bride with a floral crown at RMW... So when Lauren & Tom's beautiful english country wedding with rustic charm and snazzy home grown touches landed our W-day inbox it was smiles all around at RMW HQ.

With a Raimond Bundo dress, local suppliers, and exquisite florals this is a traditional country wedding to die for. check out the Chocolate tree! And the menu put together by the legendary Thomas The Caterer will have your tummies rumbling as you read.

Lauren The Bride: We chose to have our wedding reception at home for a few reasons; we live on a really pretty small holding with a stable block (for the dance floor, bar and band!) and had space on the driveway for a big marquee overlooking the paddocks. We wanted the day to be a casual, relaxed but pretty event and thought being at home covered this really well. We tried to keep all our wedding contributors as local as possible. We live in an amazing village with an incredible beautician/ make-up artist directly across the street from us and she managed to create the perfect look for me. My hair was done by another talented village resident (part time landlady of the local pub and part time accounts manager for the local Garage!) she was so patient and understood exactly what I was looking for, I didn't want anything too structured but wanted my hair up so that the back of my dress was visible.

My gown was a Raimond Bundo design, I really didn't want a meringue, I wanted something delicate and soft and found the unstructured designs by this Spanish designer seemed to fit the bill really well. With regards to the boutique I was again incredibly lucky, after a few failed attempts with some quite frankly grim wedding dress shop assistants in London and beyond I found the most amazing store in Oundle, Peterborough run by a Gem of a guy called Martin Charles, he is a dress designer himself so does all the alterations in store.

The only thing I was really set on with my shoes is that I wanted to wear flats, I wanted to be comfortable and happy all day long. I found some lovely little white lace ballet pumps in Accessorise that my mum then customised by spending all her evenings sewing thousands of little pearl beads into the lace design, they were the best and most personal shoes a girl could wish for.

My bridesmaids were amazing, they were completely willing to try on anything and I am also quite fortunate in that they are all gorgeous so they managed to rock pretty much everything they tried on. I did not have a definite colour in mind but knew that I wanted pastels in keeping with the soft delicate feel of the day, the Ted Baker pastel spring/summer range was a godsend! Two of the girls wore the short version of the dress and two wore long versions as was their preference, they looked stunning. The groomsmen and groom wore suits from Bosideng with pastel blue shirts and floral ties. The suits were absolutely fabulous and I am sure the guys will use them again and again.

My mum yet again stepped in to help where decorations were concerned, we wanted a traditional country wedding type look but with lots of flowers and pastels, mum and I made most of the decorations ourselves from large wooden painted hearts hung from the rafters in the stable block to ebay purchased birdcages filled with lights. We also bought little wicker hearts wherever we could and strung them together using raffia to create heart shaped mobiles that hung in the breeze.

Once again my florist Naomi Strachan was a local lady who just seemed to immediately get what we wanted; I didn't want blousy peonies or armfuls of roses I was hoping for a gentler subtler look and wanted to use as many wild flowers as possible. She came up with the perfect design a mix of sweet peas, love in the mist, Angelica and daisies. The other bonus of using Naomi is that she grows much of her own flowers and even forages a few! She did everything for us; buttonholes, pew ends, church window arrangements, mothers corsages, mothers thank you bouquets and of course my bouquet. She is a supremely talented lady.

We got married in a very small church a 2 minute stroll from our house so I was lucky enough to be able to walk to the church on the day (as is our village tradition). The church is beautiful and very old with a truly brilliant vicar. It only seats 100 people so it was a tight squeeze to get all our guests in which felt really cosy and lovely, every pew filled to the brim with our friends and family. We had a great band that completely made the night, the dance floor was a complete crush with pretty much every guest on the floor from about 8pm until midnight and even then we had to chase them out to get onto the coach. We had a Proclaimers song for our first dance 'Sunshine on Leith' which we both love and have danced around the living room to on a couple of occasions.

Our caterer was the genuinely amazing Thomas The Caterer (the man doesn't need a second name, rather like Madonna he is beyond that). He created picnic baskets for us using local ingredients; we live in the rural food capital of England so that really helped! Pork pies, stilton, potted shrimp and incredible breads and salads to name but a few of the delights in the baskets made for a really excellent lunch, Thomas followed this up with a 'Seedling' pudding, a chocolate mousse with chocolate 'soil' and a 'seedling' of candied mint. Really lovely. At about 9pm he followed it all up with Roast pork shoulders with the meat flaked on to rolls with a herb salsa, particularly nice with a bit of crackling.

I decided against a wedding cake and instead had a chocolate tree, we found a gorgeous dead branch when we were out walking the dogs (it was so huge we couldn't fit in the car so Tom had to carry it home, he had the bruise to prove it!) that I spray painted white and wound crystal ribbons around. We then threaded it with fairy lights and hung chocolates from each twig using long lengths of different colour raffia, I think it turned out fairly well and I suspect my little nephew had a few more than one or two on the day! Once again my mum made all the girls favours; lavender stuffed fabric hearts to go on the coat hanger when the smart wedding outfits get put away. The men's favours were ordered by Tom, they were the little planes that his granddad used to buy him from the corner shop, needless to say the air was thick with them throughout lunch.

We designed our own wedding invitations using pocketfold holders and a local printer for the inserts and invitation, we then wrapped the pocket folds in custom made ribbon and then used a soft silvery turquoise sealing wax to fix the ribbon with our initials inside a heart as the seal.

The only advice I can really give the bride is to try not to get carried away with the champers on the night before with the bridesmaids, you'll regret it, I know I did! Also try hard to act like a guest at your wedding, by the time the day arrives there is nothing more you can do, take a deep breath let your shoulders relax and have some fun. Also the biggest piece of advice I can give is remember the soul and centre of the day is saying your vows, so take your time, look right at him and make your promise with conviction!

Your choice of photographer is vital, I only realise this post event, seeing the photos and being amazed that he captured not just the spirit of the type of day we were trying to create but more than we ever thought was there. You don't often get comments regarding the photographer from your friends after the wedding but we did; Joseph Hall was universally praised by all as being friendly, chatty and importantly for me really calm! We also had a video made of our day which was a godsend for me as I have a bit of a memory blank on whole chunks of the day (it whizzes by in a blur) and the wedding video really helped me to remember and relive the day. Our genius suppliers were as follows:

Photography by Joseph Hall
Dress Raimond Bundo | Wedding boutique Martin Charles Bridal Gallery | Caterer Thomas The Caterer | Florist Naomi Strachan | Marquee Bradgate Party Events | Videographer Imagine Your Event