The Butchart Gardens

Some wedding venues spend months preparing flowers for a ceremony.

At The Butchart Gardens, the flowers are the venue.

For a limited wedding season from mid-January through mid-March, couples can marry inside the Spring Prelude Indoor Garden, surrounded by flowering trees, daffodils, tulips and the warmth of a garden blooming while winter still lingers outside.

Celebrations are intentionally intimate, with weddings of up to approximately 60 people including the couple.

That smaller scale suits the setting beautifully.

Guests follow the flagstone path into the garden.

Flowers surround the ceremony.

Then the vows begin somewhere that already feels almost unreal.

Afterwards, couples can remain among the gardens for photographs before gathering with their closest people for a reception and, depending on the celebration, dinner inside The Dining Room, located in the former Butchart family home.

There is something especially romantic about the seasonality of it.

This is not a setting available every weekend of the year.

For a few winter weeks, the garden opens for weddings.

Flowers bloom.

Two people make a promise.

And for couples who have always imagined getting married somewhere completely surrounded by colour and life, The Butchart Gardens offers something very close to stepping inside a storybook.