Bride Fumes After Botanical-Garden Wedding Venue Puts Netting on Trees
"A wedding at a botanical garden where you had to bring your own plants — insanity."
Published June 24 2024, 2:21 p.m. ET
A woman on TikTok named Micaela who booked her wedding venue at a botanical garden shared the way her venue "threw [her] a curveball" the the day before her wedding was supposed to take place.
During the rehearsal, she said that while she was standing with her husband and sussing out all of the details of how the ceremony was gonna go down, she noticed something odd: white netting.
... Netting that was covering beautiful plants at the base of a gazebo where she and her husband were getting married.
While she thought it was strange, she initially wrote it off as just being a protective measure taken on behalf of the botanical garden to protect its plants. Quickly putting it out of her mind, she decided to hang out with her guests and show them around the space.
She then noticed that the giant trees in the middle of the cocktail hour area also had "white netting over them" which she thought was a "little strange" again.
Micaela added that the original wedding coordinator from the venue she had been working with previously mentioned that she was leaving that particular business to start her own operation.
The TikToker added that while she was happy for the woman, she was "devastated" as she was the one she had been working with the entire time to plan her special day. The coordinator who took over the previous employee's responsibilities was "young" and Micaela said that while she was willing to give the person the benefit of the doubt, it ultimately ended up biting her in the a--.
The first red flag that sounded off in Micaela's head was when the coordinator told everyone she was going to be wearing the same dress at the wedding as she was wearing during the rehearsal dinner, which Micaela thought was unprofessional.
As they were headed to the dinner thrown for guests who attended the rehearsal, Micaela's mother went up to her to question the netting, stating that they have to be gone by tomorrow.
Micaela assumed that they "must" be, but her mother urged her to text and make sure. So Micaela did, texting the coordinator with: "The netting's coming down for the wedding tomorrow, correct?"
"No," was the response that Micaela received from the coordinator stating that the plants were covered in it for protection to ensure the plants are able to "adjust to their new home."
At this point in the video, she includes pictures of what the venue space was supposed to look like in its advertising. There are beautiful plants surrounding a fountain for the cocktail hour area, and the Gazebo ceremony space has tons of trees for picture-perfect matrimonial photo ops.
Micaela asked if the netting could be taken down just for the cocktail hour or just for 30 minutes for her ceremony. They were told that removing the netting wouldn't be possible.
(In the video, Micaela then showed pictures of what the netting ended up looking like during her bridal photographs — it looks like large white bags were placed on the trees.)
But after talking to the coordinator, Hope decided to look through all of her correspondence with the previous coordinator and all of her emails with the venue, and she says that there wasn't a single mention of there being any netting at the venue in any of the documentation or back-and-forth communication she had with the business.
Micaela said that this wasn't "fair" and the business needed to do "something" because she was never told that there would be netting on the plants which ruined the aesthetic she was going for for her wedding. She decided to ask her father for some help in trying to rectify the situation because, as she says, she and her mother are hot-headed when it comes to situations such as these.
Unfortunately he was met with the same response from the venue, which left Micaela upset and wondering what she could possibly do in order to ensure her wedding goes off without a hitch, including cutting the netting off of the trees.
She concluded, however, that she didn't want to give any more worry or thought to the netting because she was getting to marry her husband, which is all that mattered.
But that didn't mean she wasn't going to let the new coordinator know what she did wasn't cool, mentioning that the netting wasn't put in the contract and that the venue could, at the very least, remove them for just a bit of time so she could get married before putting them back on the plants.
Not wanting his daughter's wedding day aesthetic to be ruined by the venue's failure to inform Micaela about the netting, her dad went to Home Depot in order to buy new trees. Which proves that anytime a dad wants a problem solved, they're just a few trips away from a DIY store in order to make things right.
He effectively brought plants to a botanical garden, which was the whole reason she decided to book her wedding there in the first place. That would be like having a birthday party at Six Flags and you had to hire an engineer and a team of contractors to make a roller coaster while you were there, because Kingda Ka was closed.
He even rented a U-Haul to pack all of the trees in there so the netting could be blocked. To make matters worse, the day of the wedding there was a 20 percent chance of rain, so when Micaela got to the venue at 4:30 p.m. (an hour and a half before the ceremony was set to begin), the coordinator was prepping the contingency place in case of inclement weather.
Micaela begged her not to as she had planned a "big dramatic entrance" for her wedding.
"Well I make the final call and if it's greater than 20 percent I have to move it inside," the coordinator told her.
Rain did indeed come, and washed out the entire outdoor ceremony space. Micaela said that it was God's way of "handling" the "netting situation" for her and even though her ceremony was held indoors, it was beautiful.
She said that by the end of it all, the wedding coordinator "hated" her and wouldn't even make eye contact with her during on her wedding day. Micaela said she believes she had the right to be angry over the situation, and judging from comments made by other folks on the platform, it seemed like there were a lot of people who agreed that they, too, would be livid.