Avellana Orchards

Some wedding venues feel as though they were built around the idea of a love story. Avellana Orchards feels grown around one. The family-run venue sits on a 65-acre Nanaimo farm, where a hazelnut orchard frames the property and gives the celebration a sense of privacy, nature and history all at once.

Even the name carries the land with it. Avellana comes from the Latin word for hazelnut and also honours Ana, connecting the orchard to the family's heritage. That makes the setting feel more personal than a property created simply to host events. It is a working piece of family land that has been opened for other families to begin something new.

The venue is dedicated to weddings, with Marika and Levi managing the property and working with couples on their celebrations. The farm's natural surroundings and orchard create a calm Vancouver Island backdrop that can hold its own without overwhelming the details a couple wants to bring into the day.

Imagine the quiet before guests arrive, rows of hazelnut trees beyond the celebration and the whole farm seeming to slow down for a few hours around one promise. Later, when the photographs are the pieces of the day you can physically hold, the orchard will still be there in the background, tying that first day of marriage to a place with roots of its own, leaving the kind of warm, romantic memory that feels almost storybook long after the last dance.

• A historic setting