By Simone Beaumont · Priya Raghunathan & Daniel Weiss · October 11, 2025 · Hollow Road Farm, Waitsfield, Vermont · 6 min read
Foliage weekend in Vermont is a gamble everyone warns you about. Priya took the warning, looked at ten years of my leaf-timing notes, and picked October 11th anyway. “If the leaves are early,” she said, “we’ll have the apples.” The apples were, in fact, spectacular — Hollow Road Farm had two hundred trees heavy with fruit, and the farm let guests pick their own favors off the branches.
The ceremony happened under the cedar. Every photographer who has worked that lawn ends up photographing the cedar whether they mean to or not; it’s a hundred feet of quiet in the middle of the field. Priya and Daniel took their vows facing each other with their backs to everyone, so the guests watched their shoulders, their hands, the way Daniel kept nodding like he was agreeing with her before she finished. Cedar & Grain shot it all on film, and when the proofs came back, that private laugh under the branches was the frame Priya printed first.
The baraat was the moment I will retell for years. Daniel’s family had planned the traditional procession — dhol drums, dancing, the whole joyful march — and the barn was four hundred yards from the main house. So Priya’s uncle produced a tractor, garlanded it with marigolds from Foxglove & Fern, put Daniel’s grandfather on it with his drum, and led two hundred dancing people down the orchard road at four miles per hour. The horses in the neighboring pasture came to the fence to watch. Studio Anjali’s work survived ninety minutes of October wind and a full dhol set, which I consider a technical achievement.
Stone Soup Catering served squash soup in bread bowls because it was forty-eight degrees and everyone wanted to hold something warm. The Cider House Mobile Bar poured the farm’s own cider, spiked, and The Hollow River Band closed the night with a version of “Ho, Ro, My Nut-Brown Maiden” that got the entire wedding singing a fifteenth-century song they had never heard before.
Priya’s last note to me read: “The leaves were early. You were wrong. It was still perfect.” She’s right on both counts.
— Simone
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