Eloping in a Victoria Garden
The Butchart Gardens, Beacon Hill, and the mild island climate that keeps Victoria blooming nearly year-round. The most cultivated elopement in Canada.
A garden wedding sounds like a venue you rent and fill with a hundred chairs.
Victoria offers the opposite: a garden that is already perfect, and just the two of you in it.
Victoria is the one place in Canada where the garden itself is the whole event, nearly any month of the year.
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The Butchart Gardens are 55 acres built in a former limestone quarry, one of the most spectacular on earth: the Sunken Garden, the Rose Garden, the Italian and Japanese gardens, each a fully composed setting.
Why the gardens work
The Butchart Gardens are 55 acres built in a former limestone quarry, one of the most spectacular on earth: the Sunken Garden, the Rose Garden, the Italian and Japanese gardens, each a fully composed setting.
Beyond Butchart, Beacon Hill Park gives flower beds, ponds, and ocean views in the heart of the city. The landscape needs no decorating; it is already abundant.
The mild climate is the advantage
Victoria has the mildest climate in the country, so the gardens stay green and flowering while the rest of Canada is under snow. The cherry blossoms begin in February, the gardens peak in April, and even winter stays green.
I book the Butchart package or the city-park permit, plan the day around the blooms and the light, and both shoot and film it. Twelve years and 240+ couples in, the garden elopement is the one that feels like stepping into a painting that someone else already finished.
