Nobody wants clutter, and knowing you won't be showered with a mountain of it on your wedding day can be a blessed relief. Whether your a bride or groom looking to give suggestions for your own gift list or a guest looking for inspiration, the following ideas should make perfect presents to be appreciated.

Charity and green gifts

Far from being seen as a po-faced and austere gesture, giving a gift that will help a greater cause is usually taken as a very thoughtful way to celebrate a friend or relative's marriage. It can have romantic overtones too, as what could be a more fitting way to mark the occasion than to plant a tree that will grow with every year the couple are together? (and long afterwards, one hopes!)

Tree2MyDoor offers a tree dedication service that lets you choose from a range of native UK tree varieties that can be planted as part of the wedding ceremony itself, while the Dedicate A Tree gift box, available at £19.99 ensures that a tree will be planted and nurtured in an area where it's most needed to help the environment.

If you want the money put into your gift fund to go to charity, Oxfam now has a wide range of gifts and dedications that go to extremely worthy causes in its Oxfam Unwrapped range, which includes the rather sweet option of buying a he-and-she goat, which can provide milk (and baby goats!) for destitute families in Africa.

Green Gift Lists

If you like to give or receive physical 'things' as presents, but avoiding waste is your main concern, you might want to look into a green gift list. Run by ethical stores, these are much like the traditional sort, but you can be sure that every item on the list will have been carefully selected and vetted for its low carbon footprint.

One of the original and still the best green wedding lists is run by By Nature, where you can set up and manage your list online, just as you would with John Lewis et. al. The site includes eco-friendly fashion and beauty products, homewares, energy saving gadgets and more. Our Green Wedding List is another useful resource, which selects eco-friendly products from a variety of sources.

Something for the honeymoon...

Not everyone can afford to splash out on a wedding AND go away on the holiday of a lifetime within days, so why not ditch the gift list altogether and just ask guests to chip in to a honeymoon fund? If you have 100 guests, each giving a tenner (and you'd hope some might dig a little deeper than that) you've already got a cool grand ready to spend on your travels. Your friends will love you for making their life so easy, too...

No gifts?

Some couples genuinely want no gifts at all and in many ways that's understandable. Let's not forget also that the whole idea of a wedding list is completely unfair to those who never enjoy the privilege of getting married and therefore have no 'right' to dictate to friends and family what inconveniently expensive items they'd like for their homes!

A less selfless reason to object is a dislike of clutter, or the embarrassment in some cases of knowing that worse-off friends will be buying you stuff you can comfortably afford. The arguments stack up. But the fact remains that many of your guests will actively WANT to shower you with presents, and convincing them otherwise can be awkward. This is why it's usually better to specify quite clearly what you want (and don't want) and to ensure that you avoid getting the 'wrong' gifts by selecting one of the alternatives above. Many couples find that the ideal solution is to give their guests an option of a more 'traditional' gift or a charitable one.