Cypress Trees and Emerald Linen: A Château de Sannes Editorial

The ceremony was set at the head of the parterre, on the stone lip where the gravel walk begins. A cypress stood on each side. Behind, the walk ran back between the box scrolls to the basin and its jet, and beyond that to a flight of steps.

Roses, hydrangea and white stock were built into two loose columns at the edges, with more massed low on the grass. Above Camilla and Enrico there was nothing at all. A violinist stood at each side, playing across the lawn to nobody.

The lawn in front is wide, level and open, which is the part worth noticing. This arrangement faces the direction a real ceremony would face, and there is room on that grass for chairs. What the editorial leaves out is the seating, not the space for it.

The gown pairs a strapless lace corset with a full skirt. Boned and visibly laced at the back, it sits above a skirt cut wide enough to take a set of stone steps without anyone lifting it. Igilles made it.

The bouquet does the rest of the work. White lilies fall from it in one long loose line, hanging well below the hand. Against a skirt this wide it becomes the only line travelling downward, and it settles the whole shape.

Camilla wore a layered pearl choker close at the throat, a pearl bracelet and a second in crystal. The solo portraits were made in the older parts of the garden: the plane tree at the water's edge, the box scrolls, the walk of clipped hedge.

Under the plane trees on the drive, a vintage open-top Porsche puts a hard dark line into a garden that has almost none. It is the only strong dark anywhere in the piece, and the portraits made around it come out quite unlike the ones in the parterre. Elsewhere the two of them walk the box scrolls at full length, and the stone steps below the château give them somewhere to move.

The cake stood under the arcade on the château's flank, on a table skirted in gathered tulle and banked with white tulips and narcissi. Every tier was finished in wide ruffles, deep enough to throw a shadow. Champagne came in fine tulip flutes. The arcade is lime-rendered in ochre and hung with ivy, which makes it the one surface in the styling that is neither white, green nor stone.

The tables were dressed in deep emerald satin, laid straight onto the gravel of the terrace and the walk below the château. Everything else stays white, green or stone. The linen is the one strong colour, and it takes its cue from the cypresses.

Against that green the flowers turn to solid blocks. Hydrangea is banked at the table legs, more set along the centre between candles and pale ceramic, with a single cymbidium laid on each plate. The estate is run by the Roland Paix Collection, and Roland Paix catered.

Metal bistro chairs kept the line light. Long tables outdoors on gravel only work where the weather is reliable and the ground is level, which is much of the argument for planning a wedding in Provence in the first place.

Beside the water an artist worked at an easel, building the setting up in oils while it stood in front of her. The canvas held the cypresses and the château behind them, over a wash of terracotta. A wedding painter leaves a couple an object rather than a file.

Behind the hedge, on the same lawn, the team took the opposite approach and built the architecture themselves. Two white posts carry a top rail loaded with roses and delphinium, with matching masses banked at their feet. Wanderlust Wedding and La Blonde et Le Barbu are credited with the settings, and nothing about this one pretends to belong to the garden.

Put the two arrangements beside each other and the comparison is the useful part. One brought its own structure to a garden that already had some. The other spent nothing and borrowed what was standing. Neither is wrong, and the difference between them is the size of the floral order.

The menus break the format of everything else. They are round, printed with a fine dark border, and laid on round lace mats over terracotta. Beside them the jewellery keeps to the same restraint: layered pearls and drop earrings on white silk. The bridal shoes, by Bella Belle, were photographed on the bed with the garter still beside them.

A jardin à la française is designed to be read whole, as a single figure, and at ground level you only ever see a piece of it. Walk the gravel between the box scrolls and you get hedge, cypress and gap. From the windows of the house the pattern closes, with the basin at its centre.

That is worth knowing before booking, because a garden built to a plan rewards a plan. The estate privatises in full and sleeps 31 across 15 bedrooms in three separate houses. At 300 square metres, the orangery seats 220 and looks out over the pond, the vines and the Luberon; the marquee takes the same number outdoors.

Boissavi's own advice from the day is short. "Prioritise atmosphere over perfection," she writes, and "choose locations for the way they make you feel, not only for how they look." The painter packed up with the château on her canvas and the terracotta still wet. Capacity, pricing and availability sit on the château wedding venue listing for the Luberon.