Natalie and Alex met in medical school when Alex noticed Natalie wearing a t-shirt from a bar in Alex’s college town, so he had to meet her! They became running buddies, and from there the romance blossomed.
The Love Story
Their relationship was long-distance for three years due to Alex living in Utah for his residency, and Natalie living in Nebraska going to med school. Alex surprised Natalie with a New Year’s Eve trip and proposed while hiking the Twin Peaks trail.
(If that trail sounds familiar, it’s because Anne and Zack got engaged there too. We don’t make the rules, Twin Peaks is apparently where Utah couples go to say yes.)
Why Red Butte Garden
Natalie and Alex’s vision was a true garden party: ceremony outdoors, dinner and dancing indoors, and a setting that would show off Utah to their mostly out-of-town guest list. Red Butte Garden, the botanical garden in the University of Utah foothills, minutes from downtown Salt Lake City was the perfect fit! They said their vows in the Fragrance Garden, where sandstone pathways wind beneath wisteria arbors, and a fun twist on certificate witnesses, they pulled them out of a hat mid ceremony! They then moved their 64 guests inside to the Richard K. Hemingway Orangerie: a conservatory with floor-to-ceiling windows and lush tropical plants, green year-round. And fittingly for a med-school love story, nearly every one of those 64 guests was a doctor of one kind or another, something both family members mentioned in their toasts during dinner.
Planning a Utah Wedding from Nebraska
Natalie made plenty of trips to Utah during their long-distance years with every single one of them to see Alex. The number of trips she made to plan this wedding, though: zero. No tasting weekends, no walkthrough visits, no in-person meetings. From the day Red Canyon Events came on board, the entire wedding was planned from Nebraska, in the middle of medical school.
And here’s the part that still makes us smile: Alex was right here in Utah the whole time, and he was every bit as involved, he went to three different catering tastings and reported all of his notes back to Natalie. Yet all of his planning with our team happened over video too. This wedding came together without the couple and our team ever sitting in the same room.
So what did that look like? For the year leading up to the wedding, we met every three weeks; for the final four, every week. Between those calls, our team was the couple’s eyes on the ground doing the onsite venue walkthroughs and turning every “you’d really have to see it” into something Natalie could decide from her couch in Nebraska. The rental design came together the same way: linens from Specialty Linens, china from Diamond Event Rental, coordinated without Natalie ever standing in a showroom thanks to our planning team creating mockups in the design board for the couple to see.
And because nobody should book an outdoor May ceremony in Utah without a plan B, ours was built in from the start: if the weather turned, the ceremony would move inside the Orangerie where the dinner was held. But May 15 behaved, the Fragrance Garden was gorgeous, most everything in bloom, and the backup plan stayed exactly where we like it: unused.
The Design
The inspo was “regal garden party”: light yellows, shades of pink, and hints of purple, deepened with dark pinks and touches of light blue. Ben & Annie Flowers built the florals to be moved from the ceremony side to dinner and had meadow-style centerpieces that made it feel like the garden had followed everyone inside. The paper suite had its own story: Natalie designed the invitations herself, and our in-house design team carried her design through all the day-of stationery, printed by Printology so the very first thing guests received in the mail and the menu at their plate, had a touch from Natalie.
Planning a Utah Wedding from Out of State? Keep These 3 Things in Mind
1. Use a local wedding planner. They know the ins, the outs, and the best vendors for your vision and budget, knowledge you can’t build from another state.
2. Let your planner be your boots on the ground. If you can’t come out, we can do venue walkthroughs, vendor meetings, and every “you’d have to see it in person” handled locally, so you can decide from anywhere. Natalie planned this entire wedding without a single planning trip.
3. Host a welcome party at a second location. One venue can’t show off all of the beauty Utah has, a welcome event somewhere different gives your traveling guests two landscapes for one trip.
Three weeks after Natalie and Alex said their I do’s, they both moved to Nashville where Natalie got accepted into her residency and Alex started a Fellowship.
The Vendor Team:
Venue: Red Butte Garden Orangerie and Fragrance Garden
Planner: Red Canyon Events Lead Planner – Ruby Straaten
Florist: Ben & Annie Flowers
Catering & Bar: Brown Brothers
Napkins: Specialty Linens
China: Diamond Event Rental
Photographer: Elisha Braithewaite
DJ: Peak Sound
HMUA: Elyssa Hair and Makeup
Stationery & Invitations: Red Canyon Events
Printing Services: Printology
Planning a garden wedding in Salt Lake City, or planning a Utah wedding from another state entirely? Inquire with Red Canyon Events here.
You might also like: Lisa & Chris’s Red Butte Garden wedding
