Harris and DJ
Favorite Details
There was not a single flower to be found at Harris and DJ’s September wedding at Dock 5. Potted plants and candles decorated the tables in the industrial-fabulous warehouse space just above DC’s Union Market, and green foliage adorned the chuppah.
The unique challenge (aside from keeping 60 houseplants alive for a month) was to make the foliage act like flowers. In selecting the greenery, I looked for different shades of green, unique textures, and varying leaf sizes. I leaned into variegated pittosporum, whose leaf structure resembles green and white petals on a flower. I loved the locally-grown raspberry, spirea, and hops vine….OK, hops are technically flowers, and they appeared in the boutonnieres and pocket flowers that Harris and DJ wore.
In a Jewish ceremony, the chuppah represents the home the couple will build together, and I like to approach the chuppah decoration with this in mind (see Raina and Max’s wedding story for more on this). Planner Sara Muchnick had envisioned a no-nonsense, masculine chuppah, and I was thrilled to find that a fellow florist was willing to sell a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design that assembles like a puzzle. As a huge fan of FLW’s “organic architecture” (I literally wrote a report on him in 2nd grade. My dad is an architect, OK?), I am excited to add this piece to my inventory for future couples to use! I imagined the chuppah design as a rustic cabin in the woods, overgrown with vines, pockets of ferns sprouting from between its boards.
