Photo: Gayle Brooker
Terra-cotta vessels full of clematis, hellebores, ranunculus, garden roses, and geranium greenery adorned tables.
Emma Donaldson Harrell can trace her life through blooms. Growing up at her family’s garden boutique, Abide A While, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, meant a childhood configured around greenery. The nursery, which her grandparents opened in 1957 after buying the land for $300 and a camellia plant, has since grown to sell thousands of trees, shrubs, houseplants, and other garden stunners each year. Harrell remembers childhood evenings spent with her older sister, Eleanor, wheeling rolling chairs through the hydrangea and orchid–fringed pathways after closing time. Even the hard work—loading pots into cars, toting around watering cans and hoses, working behind the register—holds a wellspring of happy memories. “I have done everything under the sun at Abide A While,” Harrell says. “And we would all have so much fun.”
Her relationship with Bo Harrell, her high school sweetheart, budded when he’d visit her at the shop after school and she’d giddily show off colorful new arrivals. After he proposed, in 2021, Harrell knew she wanted to bring the magic of the gardens and her family’s green heart into her autumn wedding day at Hibernian Hall, a circa-1840 Greek Revival meeting space in downtown Charleston—and phoning Gathering Events, a local event planning and floral studio, was one of her first and easiest calls.
Photo: Gayle Brooker
Emma and Bo Harrell; the gate in front of Hibernian Hall greeted guests with bright yellow oncidium orchids, forsythia blooms, and mandarin orange branches.
“It’s such an intimate thing to be with someone’s family at one of the most important times in everyone’s lives, when everyone’s coming together,” says Heather Barrie, Gathering’s founder. “There’s so much to celebrate.” With a nursery full of inspiration, Harrell let Barrie and her team run wild to create “really dreamy, detailed pockets throughout the evening,” says Mary Ruth Miller, a designer and planner at Gathering.
The magic began outside the Hibernian, where the double wrought-iron gates, wrapped with clouds of airy greenery and electric swaths of yellow forsythia, framed a portal into a floral wonderland. Candlelit glass cloches, nestled with puffs of moss on terra-cotta garden saucers, flanked the entryway. Floral designer Max Diego twirled leafy vines around the arc of the ironwork, interspersing flowers into the woody spaces. Showy gloriosa lilies, clusters of teeny yellow oncidium orchids, and branches heavy with mandarin oranges encircled the gate—full, textural, and wild, as if the arrangement had been part of a long-established Charleston garden for decades.
Photo: Gayle Brooker
Potted citrus plants and topiaries framed the sweetheart table on the patio, designed for the bride and groom to share a private moment in the midst of the fun.
Inside, Barrie tapped the drapery team at the event planning firm Loluma to encase the white walls of the historic venue with rich velvet-green wall hangings, a nod to a moss-hued shoe that Harrell had shared from her vision board. “We really want to try to pull some things that reflect what a bride and groom are drawn to in their every day,” Miller says. Gathering translated Harrell’s fondness for moody, dusky colors and photos of friends mingling at dinner parties into an intimate sylvan setting, one where stylized floral moments could sing.
Photo: Gayle Brooker
Emma’s bouquet included dainty clematis, passionflower vine, campanula, and hyacinth blooms; locally foraged groundsel branches, or sea myrtles, sprouted from the bar.
At the dark wood–paneled bars on either side of the entry door, for instance, Diego played up theatrical shapes. Striking towers of sea myrtles rose above the ends of the bars as taper candles lit the shrubs’ knots of cream petals. “These flowers only bloom in October and November here,” Diego says. “So it’s really special to pull in something from the time of the wedding.” Clematis, a flowering vine that appeared throughout the evening in the tablescapes and Harrell’s bouquet, snaked over the tops of the bars and encompassed the candles, the vine’s star-shaped blossoms nodding in different directions. “When we came to the whole juxtaposition of this kind of lavender, mauve color with the yellows, it was so exciting for us,” Barrie says. “It’s such an unusual palette—a lot of [brides] like white, blush, and green.”
Sunny oncidium orchids from the gate outside echoed in the heart of the ballroom, rambling around a trellis wrapped with lush muscadine and thick greenery. “We try to carry the same feel throughout the space by repeating certain plants and textures,” Barrie explains. The team designed a cozy perch beneath the arc of vines with back-to-back plush green couches and an explosive yellow and chartreuse arrangement flanked by smaller potted flowers and wispy ferns pulled from Abide A While.
Photo: Gayle Brooker
Oncidium orchids, forsythia, citrus, ferns, clematis, smilax vines, and muscadine vines foraged in the Lowcountry framed the central lounge area.
That was perhaps the most memorable aspect for Harrell: Gathering had explored her family’s gardens and shop, collecting flowers with meaning to scatter throughout the space. Diego had snipped citrus branches from trees planted by her grandfather, draping them around the massive central trellis. Lady’s slipper and dendrobium orchids, which Harrell remembers excitedly unboxing at the store, sat in familiar weathered pots, vases, and baskets on tables. Barrie’s team plucked a dainty purple pansy for Bo’s boutonniere, a favorite bloom grown by Harrell’s grandmother. “That was such a special touch to her,” Harrell says. The team punctuated the re-created gardens within the Hibernian with other treasures from Harrell’s family—glass insects sold at Abide A While; vintage botany books; saved strips of ribbon, silver, and sculptural glasses from her mother’s expansive antique collection—adding a touch of intentionality to every flower-covered surface. “I feel like everything I saw, I could point and say, I know what that is,” Harrell says.
Photo: Gayle Brooker
Even the couple’s getaway car donned flowers.
The Gathering team looked to their personal gardens, too. When Diego noticed a delicate purple bloom from his own passionflower the morning of the wedding, he eagerly brought it in for the bridal bouquet. “That was really special,” Harrell recalls. “We didn’t imagine the flowers could be this amazing.”
Gabriela Gomez-Misserian, Garden & Gun’s digital producer, joined the magazine in 2021 after studying English and studio art in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She is an oil painter and gardener, often uniting her interests to write about creatives—whether artists, naturalists, designers, or curators—across the South. Gabriela paints and lives in downtown Charleston with her golden retriever rescue, Clementine.
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