Extremely Small Loop (title thumbnail only) ..and how to make it actually work

Site in question: https://www.bermudabride.com/petals/site/

Everything on the page is, for the moment, completely static. A few things here and there are controlled by custom fields, but nothing updates when any other part of the site is.

I’d like to have the left-most thumbnail [blog] change to the featured image of the most recent blog post, and “What’s new and inspiring” change to reflect the most recent blog title [https://www.bermudabride.com/petals/site/category/blog].

I cannot, however, no matter what tutorial I look at, find a way to make a loop/get posts bit where this will actually function as intended.

If someone could let me know an extremely condensed way to make this happen, that’d be greatly appreciated.

So:

– get posts: no category, only one (and the most recent) post
– post title
– post thumbnail
– whatever closing tags are required

Essentially a completely self contained loop, as that little section will be the ONLY place where WP is used on that page.