DHIKA & BRANDON

For Dhika and Brandon’s wedding in Kyoto, we began with an early seventeenth-century Japanese screen of autumn grasses moving in the wind.

Eulalia and bush clover gathered in rhythmic clumps and sharp diagonals, suggesting depth and motion. We were drawn to the care behind their apparent wildness, and carried that idea into a spring wedding high in the hills of Higashiyama.

At Shogunzuka Seiryuden, with Kyoto below and Osaka faintly visible beyond, guests gathered in a loose hexagon around a square platform clad in silver leaf. Mirrored bowls of water caught the sky among pale yellow gladioli, lilac campanula and peppermint peonies. Whole lotus plants, washed clean of mud, revealed their roots beneath the flowers.

Green maple branches hovered low across the deck. With so much landscape around us, we kept the planting close to the ground, leaving the view open.

As the sky turned blue and dusty pink, Kyoto began to light up below.

Dinner moved into the historic hall, fragrant with hinoki. At the foot of its cypress columns stood towering compositions of Japanese pieris, each taking a different form, informed by the sculptural freedom of ikebana.

On the tables, orchids nestled in folded origami vessels filled with rice, alongside epiphyllum, sarracenia and curly alliums. Ume, just coming into season, lay among the place settings like fallen fruit.

For Dhika, whose heritage is Japanese, we made a bouquet of hosta leaves and fresh strawberries, bound with silk cord. At Brandon’s lapel, strawberries met nepenthes.